After the birth of our fourth child, I visited the medical clinic for a routine examination.
My doctor asked if either my husband or I had undergone sterilisation, to which I responded with a horrified negative. Sensing he’d offended me, he apologised.
Then he asked a standard post-partum check-up question: what did we plan to use for contraception?
I was tempted to launch into a wordy preamble about how I find the very word repugnant, but I was wearing only a disposable drape sheet and getting colder by the minute.
I gave the short answer: “We use natural family planning, in accordance with our religious convictions.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, “you’re…”
“Catholic,” I finished.
He began to apologise again, “I hope you weren’t offended … I didn’t mean to offend you …”
I was not offended, just disheartened, for I know that my husband and I are an anomaly.
The doctor told me that most of his Roman Catholic patients disregard the Church’s teaching, adding that he admired us for sticking to our principles.
He asked me why the Church teaches that contraception is wrong, and I did my best to answer in what little time I had.
I left the office pondering the incongruity (or divine sense of humour) of evangelising in a horizontal position, wearing nothing but a giant paper towel.
Later that day, I found myself still thinking about my discussion with the doctor.
It disturbed me that sterilisation is treated so casually, that so many people regard it as the most ‘responsible’ choice once you’ve had your second child.
And if you’ve had your third, fourth, or fifth, they are positively alarmed that you haven’t done anything to rectify your fertility problems.
We pay lip service to the notion that children are a blessing, then do everything medically necessary to make sure God never gives us another.
Since fertility can be medically controlled, most of us including, unfortunately, many Catholics – do all we can to control it.
Yet in the knowledge that God has numbered every hair on our heads and orchestrates each heartbeat, the idea of being in control of anything is illusory.
Moreover, in seeking to avoid the crosses associated with bearing and raising children, we often hew crosses for ourselves that are heavier than those Jesus might have meant for us.
How many women thought they were ‘in control’ of their sexuality when the Pill and promiscuity came into vogue, only to find themselves infertile or ill with cancer decades later?
What will be the long-term effects (health or spiritual) on the present generation of parents who are so avidly snipping and severing? Jesus says, “He who tries to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will live.”
So what’s wrong with preventing conception?
Nothing gets destroyed, does it? (Set aside for a moment all arguments concerning personal and marital integrity.) Consider Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
Before we were called into being during the procreative act, we existed in the mind and will of God.
We were, as the saying goes, a glint in our Father’s eye.
When it comes to conceiving new life, our loving Father never forces the hand of human parents (although we who’ve had less-than-timely pregnancies are sometimes tempted to think otherwise).
He awaits our free and open response in co-operating with his divine will.
The use of contraception thwarts the will of God.
If God retains the exclusive prerogative to create life, why do some of us believe he hasn’t the right to premeditate that creation?
When the Lord is in control, there is no such thing as an “unplanned” pregnancy.
In Catholic evangelist Ralph Martin’s booklet Where Are We Now? he writes, “Infanticide, euthanasia, and abortion are a direct assault on the sovereignty of God …[They] express rebellion against the truth – that life belongs to God and not to us.
They deny God’s grace, which is totally sufficient for all the hardships of life.”
I believe the same may be said of contraception. It’s an abomination that has decimated “postmodern” western nations, demographically and spiritually.
Heaven help us if we don’t wake up to that reality soon.