A Catholic Physician’s reflection on the Holy Father’s comments on abortion and contraception with regards to the Zika virus.

Dr John Lee

President FIAMC

In an interview with journalist Paloma García, Pope Francis made some comments on the issues of abortion and birth control that have caused a stir leading some people to believe that the views of Pope Francis differ from the previous teachings of the church.

During the course of the very short interview, the journalist suggested that some authorities had proposed abortion or avoiding a pregnancy as methods of birth control for women afflicted with the Zika virus. She asked if the church would consider these two methods as a “lesser evil” in this particular case.

It seems to be inevitable that every time any ecclesial authority speaks about contraception, the media stops to listen if there could be a change in one of the most controversial topics in Catholic morality: birth control.

At the bottom of that expectation lies a gross misunderstanding of morality and a legalistic understanding of the authority of the church in moral matters. Some seem to think that the church imposes too heavy a burden on its followers when it comes to matters of sexuality. This belief has nourished the hope that one day ecclesiastical authority may have mercy on its flock and lift up the seemingly unbearable burden of the ban on contraception and give some leeway for Christians to use contraceptives freely.

That hope is based on the assumption that morality, ecclesiastical or otherwise, is the result of conventional decisions of the authority. Consequently the Pope has the power to decide what is morally right and wrong for Catholics.

The problem with that assumption is that morality is based on what is good in itself for the human person and not on what man decides. The human good, just like truth, is something objective totally independent of people’s perceptions and opinions. As a consequence, moral right or wrong is not something the church or any human institution is competent to make decisions about. Quite the opposite is something that all need to feel compelled to discover.

Consistent with that idea, the authority of the church does not make decisions about what is morally right or wrong but faithfully teaches the revealed truths she has been entrusted with. In line with this, it is vain to hope that Pope Francis or any other Pope could change what the church has consistently and faithfully taught as true.

How then should we understand the words of Pope Francis in the said interview?

First and foremost, an interview must be judged by what it is, a conversation with a journalist, often after long and tiring Papal journeys. It is therefore clear that we should not expect the same degree of accuracy and precision that official documents have.

Secondly, in this interview Pope Francis engages the journalist Paloma García with her own choice of terms, namely, the seemingly “lesser evil” compared with a presumably “greater good” of having children free from the presumed deformities that the Zika virus cause.

Pope Francis, in the interview, strongly rejects the language of “lesser evil” for abortion, but accepts it for “avoiding pregnancies”, and this distinction seemed to have fueled the hope for a change in Pope Francis on the teachings of the church regarding contraception.

First and foremost, Pope Francis makes very clear that abortion is never justified, even when done for a good purpose; in other words, the prohibition of abortion is regarded in the church as absolute.

However, the language of “lesser evil” is very confusing.  In a previous case of mass media confusion when Pope Benedict XVI commented in the book Light of the World that the use of condoms by male prostitutes could be a “first step in the direction towards moralization” (Light of the World, p. 117-119), some started to think that the Pope was considering the use of condoms as a lesser evil compared with the greater evil of infecting the client with HIV. The CDF intervened: “Some commentators have interpreted the words of Benedict XVI according to the so-called theory of the “lesser evil”. This theory is, however, susceptible to proportionalistic misinterpretation (cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis splendor, n. 75-77). An action which is objectively evil, even if a lesser evil, can never be licitly willed.” (CDF, 22 December 2010)

Of course, not all wrong actions are equally wrong and thus some are less evil than others and Pope Francis rightly clarifies that abortion is a greater evil than avoiding pregnancies. But to suggest that some morally wrong acts can be justified by a greater good because they are a lesser evil contradicts the church’s teaching on morality that has always maintained that “the end does not justify the means” (Cf. Rom 3:7-8). The document Humanae Vitae is very clear in this respect: “Neither is it valid to argue as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one…. It is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it.” (Humanae Vitae, 14)

Having said that, the church carefully distinguishes between contraception and avoiding pregnancies. The Pope indeed did not refer in his interview to contraception but merely to the avoidance of pregnancies, which the church has permitted for “well-grounded reasons” as, once again, Humanae Vitae explains: “If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles”(Humanae Vitae, 16)

To sum up, could spouses avoid the birth of a deformed child by committing abortion? Absolutely not. Could spouses avoid a pregnancy if they suspect their child is going to be severely deformed? It depends. If they, in conscience, honestly think that they cannot care lovingly and responsibly for such a child, it would not be wrong for them to avoid such pregnancy by abstaining from fertile sexual intercourse.

But what exactly is the moral rationale behind the position of the church on contraception and the permissibility of avoiding a pregnancy?

The two guiding moral principles that should help parents to decide how many children they should have are responsibility and generosity. They should accept generously the number of children they can be responsible for according to their judgment of conscience. The question is then, once spouses judge honestly that they should space their pregnancies and avoid for the time being conceiving a child, how should they do it? Must they avoid sexual intercourse altogether or could they purposely avoid only fertile intercourse by using some method of fertility awareness? Could they benefit from sexual intercourse and use contraceptives to make those acts infertile?

There is no discussion about the fact that couples could have sexual intercourse even when they know that their sexual acts are not procreative, as is the case of couples who are sterile or reach menopause. The question that seems to be more confusing is whether there is a difference between choosing to have sexual intercourse only during the infertile days of the fertility cycle to avoid a pregnancy and choosing to make fertile sexual acts infertile through the use of contraceptives. Is there any moral difference between those two choices?

In general terms we can say that once we have been offered something we must accept it or reject it. Spouses who knowingly engage in fertile sex are offering each other their own child. At that point they must make a decision to accept or reject that possible child. Contraception is the choice to reject the child that has been voluntarily offered. If spouses who think they cannot afford to bring another child into the world do not want to reject their possible child nor procreate irresponsibly, the reasonable thing to do is to avoid fertile sexual intercourse.

As some theologians have sharply pointed out, one thing is to believe that unwanted children must never be born or even conceived; another is to believe that there must never be an unwanted child and therefore we must never contracept his or her marital acts.

But contraception does not only affect the love between spouses and children; it also affects the love between the spouses themselves. It is hardly noticed that human fertility, that is, the capacity to procreate a human being, is the most powerful faculty of the human person; at least, if we are of the opinion that a human person is the most valuable entity on earth.

Contracepting a sexual act is nothing but voluntarily choosing to eliminate this power in the person, at least momentarily.  All this amounts to little if we adopt a dualistic mentality that permits us to think that the person is only a mind using a physical instrument we call the body. According to such a dualistic mentality, fertility would be only a bodily function totally external and instrumental to the person that we can subjugate as we do with the rest of the material world.

But if, with the church, we think that the person is an integral unity of body and soul, then eliminating the most powerful capacity of the body cannot be something impersonal and irrelevant. It amounts to reject an integral part of the person. Spouses who demand their fertility to be removed, engage, not in a act of unconditional acceptance (Christian love), but in an act of conditional interest: I want you, but not your fertility.

To conclude, we can say that for someone who hasn’t yet fallen into a utilitarian and/or dualistic mentality, contraception is more than merely avoiding a pregnancy. It is rejecting or unwanting both their future child and their fertility. In other words, contraception is an offence against the unconditional love that spouses must have for each other and their attitude towards their future children.

And this choice is morally different from the choice of spouses who use methods of fertility awareness to avoid fertile sexual intercourse so as not to put themselves in a situation where they must choose between two evils, namely, either procreating irresponsibly if they cannot afford another child or rejecting their fertility and their future children if they contracept.

Briefly, as it is the case with every moral problem, it all boils down to love and this is where the role of the Pope comes in. Their role is that in spite of the worldly winds of different opinions and philosophies, the people of God can continue to be faithful to the integrity of the gospel that calls all to love unconditionally even our enemies, and, all the more, calls spouses to accept themselves totally and co-create with God welcoming children responsibly and lovingly.