Does This Mean I've Arrived? - It's Not Everyday That I Get Trad-Catholic Hate Mail

THE OFFICIAL CATHOLIC teaching on contraception and that thing which something like that official teaching on contraception is bound to cause, abortion, is exactly the kind of thing you can expect from what is guaranteed to be an incomplete and approximate system of thought being presented as complete and rigidly true.   In fact the two taken together is an excellent example of what that leads to, consequences and the hypocritical denial that one causes the other AND ESPECIALLY IN THIS CASE BECAUSE ALL OF IT IS A RESULT OF THE ASSERTIONS OF MEN WHO ARE NEVER PREGNANT AND CELIBATE MEN WHO BY AND LARGE DO NOT RUN ANY RISK FROM ANY OF IT.   It is an abstract application of patriarchal medieval theology formulated by previous generations of men who didn't marry and who didn't have to worry about the real life consequences of their ideological declarations being imposed on Women and couples who have real lives far more complex and problematic which are anything but abstract archetypes.   

If the United States had had fifty years of encouraging people who are sexually active to be responsible in their use of contraception, the abortion rate, both in the period when it was legal and when it was illegal, would have been far, far lower than it has been.  If men had been encouraged to be responsible in the use of condoms, the STD rate, including those which are life threatening, would have been far lower along with the pregnancy and abortion rates. The part played in that by the Catholic hierarchy and conservatives who used that official teaching to suppress the information and encouragement that would have led to far fewer unwanted pregnancies is not calculable but I'm sure it was a huge part of the reason for the high abortion rate in the United States.   It joins movies, TV, the porn industry, pop kulcha and other venues for encouraging irresponsible sex in having produced that result and the courts, the Supreme Court, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry in producing that result, also, in the case of the courts and the "civil libertarians" out of a totalistic  ideological system which, as in most lawyerage, was no skin off of the judges and "justices" and well-paid lawyers' noses. 

Paul VI would not have wanted to face the fact of what his resort to a citation of Aquinas, a celibate male monk who believed women were biologically and intellectually inferior to men was absurd in 1966 :

With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person. (9)

The citation's footnote says:  (9) See St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, art. 2.  

If you look at all of the citations given by Paul VI to support his ban on effective, modern contraception you will look in vain for the thinking of anyone who was not a celibate male.  With the possible exception of the authors of two of the Gospels who are not known to have been but may have been married men.  Of course there are no women cited.  The Aquinas citation is all about the uniformity of "natural law" apparently not even bothering to wonder if maybe Women who could become pregnant when it might be anything from unwanted to life threatening might have had a valid viewpoint that all of those men wouldn't have twigged onto.   When Aquinas and, it would seem, Paul VI talked about "natural law" they only meant "natural law" as conceived by well less than half of the human population.  They weren't alone in that, the US. Constitution as originally written has the same character.  No doubt it still seems novel for someone to bring that fact up.

There was a clearly political cannonization by JPII of a woman who chose to die as a result of a pregnancy instead of having an abortion to save her life and to be there to raise her already born children.  While it was her choice, I don't see how that was responsible parenthood.  Apparently her husband didn't think that being sterilized so as not to endanger his wife would be responsible parenthood on his part, it so seldom seems to enter into the picture, men taking responsibility.  As written up, her story is all presented as happy endings, though I'm sure for one that can be written up like that there are hundreds where the death of the mother led to anything but happy endings.  Thus the need for women having control of their own bodies.  

There have been nuns who got into hot water for helping women whose lives would be put in danger from another pregnancy obtain birth control or to be voluntarily sterilized so the women could live and take care of their children.  I strongly suspect that, being women, those nuns could imagine the lives of the mothers and their living children better than men sitting in the Vatican or in bishop's palaces and residences and sitting in monasteries could. 

Paul VI was far from the worst of the Popes of my lifetime, he was, in many ways, a good Pope, though not the best of them.  He may not have realized what would result from his chickening out from taking the advice of the committee he put together to advise him on the issues of artificial contraception - not to mention the stupidity of the fraudulent "rhythm method" - but no one in 2021 has the right to an assumption of such innocence.  You have to ignore going on sixty years of not only disastrous consequences but the rejection of his ruling by even the large majority of Catholics, most of whom, at some point, use birth control to exert some responsibility when they have sex.   I only wish it happened more often.  There would be a lot less preventable trouble from people having sex.  Which they will no matter who tells them they shouldn't.   The Catholic hierarchy has hardly been able to keep men vowed to celibacy from having sex, always, in that case, outside of marriage and generally irresponsibly and in not a few cases, criminally.   

I am increasingly finding that I'm taking what Women have to say about everything far more seriously because if you look only at what men say, you're bound to have a seriously deficient view of reality and of life and of the truth.  Added to that, the same is true if you exclude the thinking of People of Color, of non-academic, non-elite people.  Our institutions generally only or almost exclusively take what a tiny fraction of people think seriously.  And they believe they can come up with all encompassing systems out of that tiny slice of experience and observation.  It's not a march of folly, they arrived and stopped at folly centuries ago.