Marriage, the Family, and Sex—: a Roman Catholic View

MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND SEX—A ROMAN CATHOLIC VIEW ROBERT H. SPRINGER, SJ.* Current sociological studies of marriage and the family in our culture portray dramatic departures from past forms of these institutions. For that matter, the family—the unit of human society—has always displayed a marked plasticity: "... there is no such thing as an eternal and natural family pattern that is specific to humanity. Ethnology and history have by now accustomed us to envisage the family as a relative configuration, culturally and historically determined, of which there are countless variants. Our contemporary experience has convinced us —perhaps with some anxiety—that we are witnessing, if not actually effecting, a profound transformation of the typically western family pattern inherited from our ancestors" [1, p. 419]. Such developments portend dramatic changes in our ethical thinking and contain serious implications for counseling. To continue with traditional ethical norms unmodified by changes in human life would be to harm the very values which the norms are set up to safeguard: the values of the child to the family and society at large, the pervasive value of love in human relationships, the value of self-control, and the value of fidelity to a chosen partner. Moral rules that are out of touch with reality run the risk of diminishing returns from human compliance . Or worse, they become counterproductive. Laws that are out of date create contempt for legitimate authority. We have other familiar examples of this. Polygamy may have been appropriate in an earlier age of humankind in which females were social inferiors or where they were a plurality in a society decimated of males by warfare. The rule permitting polygamy is totally outdated today, when social conditions allow and demand the equality of woman as a person. Another example is the family in the agricultural stage of human evolution in which 10 pregnancies were needed to insure that five or six children would survive to till the fields. In the industrial age, with modern medicine dramatically lowering infant mortality, fewer *The Crossroads of Reflection and Action, 204 West 97th Street, New York, New York 10025. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1976 | 187 pregnancies are required. The older ethic based on the need for nearly unlimited generation will no longer serve the value of preserving the family in health and happiness. The purpose of this article is to investigate how profound changes in western family patterns and in human living contain implications for our ethics and for the counseling role of those in the healing and educating professions. We know already of the upheaval in the Catholic church over contraception . More than half of all married couples in their fertile years find it necessary to use contraception—many in good conscience despite the official teaching of their church. Meanwhile, the newer theological view—responsible use of contraceptives—has gained respectable moral status. A considerable number of Catholic theologians hold this view contrary to church authority. What has happened, in part, is that pressures on parents for fewer children have led to a rethinking of moral -norms composed in an age when large families were an economic necessity . The abortion storm is raising even larger waves. Here new biological data have led ethicists to reconsider the older norm of respect for life from the moment of conception. Amniocentesis detects fetal abnormality prior to birth. Some instances of abnormality are so gross as not to warrant expenditure of the love and care normally demanded of parents . To save life in some of these instances conflicts with the value of preserving the lives of the already born. The knowledge that twinning can occur as late as 2 weeks after conception makes it difficult to hold that a person is present from the beginning and then somehow divided into two "souls." Faced with such new data, the older norm of absolute respect for life from conception must be rethought. Otherwise, respect for life will suffer. It is in the light of such considerations that new ethical rules are being elaborated. Official Catholic teaching still holds for human life from conception and allows only indirect abortion to save maternal life or health. But an unofficial ethical view...