Ethics of Procreation and the Defense of Human Life: Contraception, Artficial Fertilization, and Abortion

Appendix: An Initial Response to Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler

285 Appendix An Initial Response to Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler f My argument in support of Humanae Vitae, as it was exposed in the original and shorter 1989 article in the Linacre Quarterly and in Natural Law and Practical Reason, has been challenged by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler in their The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 75–84. The criticism of these authors, however, who try to set forth a clearly revisionist sexual anthropology and morality, fails because, though they discuss at some length what they call my “admirable” argument against contraception, they do not even mention—in their critical reflection on my approach to contraception—its core, and therefore seriously misconstrue it. This is hard to understand because their preceding discussion of my approach to natural law recognizes crucial elements of it that they then neglect when criticizing my approach to contraception (i.e., the body-soul unity of the person, the grounding of natural law in the body—although natural law pertains properly to reason—and the grounding of virtue in the body). Although my analysis recognizes that intentionality is crucial (though not sufficient) for an adequate definition/description of the relevant human acts— whether contraceptive acts or acts of periodic abstinence— my argument for the immorality of contraceptive acts is not 286   Appendix based, as Salzman and Lawler suggest, on a purely intentional difference between contraception and periodic abstinence. This is the key reason why their criticism of my view, while sophisticated in some respects, is far off the mark. More specifically, they argue—against my approach— that since both contraception and periodic abstinence involve an “intentionality ” to prevent conception, they are morally indistinguishable. This argument, however, relies upon a reading into my analysis of their own broad—and highly inadequate—understanding of “intentionality .” Whereas my understanding follows Aquinas in holding that intentions depend on reason (which truthfully grasps the relevant matter and circumstances of the action) and are measured by reason, their broad notion of “intentionality” is something different, corresponding to the subjective preferences of the agent. In their critical remarks, the authors fail to mention that the core of my argument is about the embodiment of procreative responsibility in the concrete sexual behavior; that it is, thus, an argument centered in the “language of the body,” in the moral requirement, anthropologically founded, that the body and bodily sexual behavior are to act as subject, and not only an object, of procreative responsibility. By this I mean that the body, with its procreative power, is not to be seen as an object to be manipulated (i.e., via anovulant pills) but as part of an acting subject who is a unity of body and soul. This recognition of the body as integral subject of procreative responsibility is central to a proper construal of the nexus between the virtue of chastity and sexual acts. According to my argument, this nexus is not simply an intentional relation, as Salzman and Lawler make me say (by forcing my thought under their broad notion of “intentionality”), but a relation based on the insight that the virtue of chastity, part of temperance, requires the body to participate as subject and active principle in procreative responsibility (which itself is shown to be a constitutive part of marital chastity). So, everything that Salzman and Lawler induce against my argument is based precisely on the omission of mentioning its core rationale. When this core rationale is thus neglected, quotations from my article (to which they do not even give a complete bibliographical reference) are thus taken out of context, and their meaning is thereby changed. What in my text is often already a conclusion of the argument is presented as the argument itself and then easily shown as not demonstrat- Response to Salzman and Lawler   287 ing the conclusion. By omitting that, for me, part of the intentionality included in contraception is precisely to render superfluous the modification of bodily sexual behavior, they ask: “If, however, the intentionality of periodic abstinence is not to procreate, why cannot artificial contraception , which has the same intentionality, be considered a marital act as well?” (82). Everything in this question is wrong. Salzman and Lawler are able to formulate it plausibly because they treat periodic abstinence as a kind of (non-artificial) contraception, while I precisely showed why this is a...