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C H A P T E R 6 Conclusion W hen I first started researching this book several years ago, the Catholic ethics of contraception seemed like a parochial topic, one that might be of interest only to Catholics. When friends and colleagues would ask what I was working on, I could always count on humorous responses, such as ‘‘a book on Catholics and contraception; . . . that ought to take you one page!’’ What more was there to say about this topic? In the midst of a world that had overwhelmingly accepted the use of contraceptives as a positive, morally licit act, Catholics were the lone holdouts.1 In other words, debating the morality of contraception seemed somewhat old-fashioned. Even for Catholics, the divisive debates about contraception in the 1960s seemed to have faded, leaving many Catholics to choose privately how they would respond to the Church’s ban on artificial contraception. Overwhelmingly , the statistics confirm that many Catholics are using artificial contraception in defiance of the official Church teaching.2 By the time I had completed writing most of this book, however, the issue of Catholics and contraception had unexpectedly burst onto the public stage.3 It reemerged as a contested topic in many public and non-Catholic contexts—most notably in the 2012 US presidential elections. The Catholic teaching about contraception is now at the center of broader political debates about health care, conscience, and freedom of religion. Today it is unlikely that anyone could claim that the morality of contraception is a nonissue; the debate, albeit in a different form than the 1960s, continues to rage. Artificial contraceptives are such a widely accepted part of American culture that the controversies are no longer about their general permissibility, but are rather about whether they ought to be part of the basic provision of health care. 166 conclusion 167 In some ways the recent attention to contraception is really not about contraception at all, but rather about political control. My choice to pursue this subject matter was not tied to its popularity or lack of popularity. Indeed, I was drawn to it partly because I was puzzled by the lack of scholarly attention to this topic. Since the turbulence of the 1960s, when Americans saw important Supreme Court decisions about contraception followed soon after by Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae, there has been relative silence in the scholarly literature on the morality of contraception. In the intervening years, new issues and developments related to contraceptives convinced me that a close analysis of Catholic moral discourse on contraception would provide an important case to help clarify our understanding of the cultural production of moral arguments. Conversely, I was certain that in order to understand Catholic discourse about contraception, it was necessary to see it as part of broader public practices of moral deliberation. The contexts of HIV/AIDS, rape and emergency contraception, and population require that the discussion about contraception engage with what non-Catholics are saying and doing. Catholic speech about the morality of contraception is always embedded in the overlapping discourses of sex, violence, and justice. These three terms form an inseparable triad insofar as to speak about sexuality is to speak about the violence and harm that it can so easily cause. It is also to speak about just human relationships and about the just social structures necessary to sustain them. My intent throughout this book has been to show how one tradition ’s responses to a complex issue such as contraception are shaped and molded by cultural realities. I have attempted to suggest some relevant insights about the mechanisms of this culture–religion interaction generally . Indeed, because religious moral discourses engage in practices of public justification, they are deeply cultural expressions. Contraception is a significant moral issue for numerous reasons, and its significance depends on how one construes this activity. Thus, for some, the morality of artificial contraception is primarily about the regulation of sexual acts and the more particular concern about whether promoting contraception encourages sexual promiscuity. Others construe it mainly as harmful to human life, either directly to an embryo or indirectly through interference with the life-giving process. Yet others worry about the implications of contraception in terms of economic, political, environmental, and gender justice—matters that are tied to the well-being and flourishing of the human community and the planet. [18.191.228.88] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 19...

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