Berkley Center

In a recent edition of Georgetown's student newspaper, the Hoya, a graduate student in my department voiced her shock and consternation that the university health plan does not cover birth control prescriptions. The online version of the article has generated heated commentary, with people on the respective sides - for or against Georgetown's policy, one that reflects respect toward the Catholic position on artificial birth control - largely (and typically) speaking past each other.

I want to express some sympathy with the article's author, although not for the expected reasons. She is right to be surprised, and perhaps even upset. But this is not because Georgetown is too Catholic, but because it is insufficiently Catholic, particularly inasmuch as it offers no public and ongoing justification of this policy. The policy is allowed to stand on its own, without explanation or justification in the daily life and activities of the university. Her complaint is not cause for revision of the policy, but for more effort on behalf of the university to advance the reasons for the policy as a part of its educational mission.

The case against artificial birth control - long an accepted teaching of Christianity, and long a position that was held by Protestants and Catholics alike - was reaffirmed strongly by the Church in modern times in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. At its heart was the argument that the use of artificial birth control - particularly as it became increasingly an accepted social norm - would result in the degradation of the sexual act, the objectification of women in particular, and a degradation of the culture to one that would become highly sexualized and pornographic. By de-linking human sexuality from reproduction, it would destabilize marriage and transform human sexuality into an utilitarian activity that would ultimately damage the human ecology.

Pope Paul VI - the author of Humanae Vitae - accurately foresaw the consequences of a society where the use of artificial birth control became the norm:

"Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificially limiting the increase of children. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men--especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point--have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion."

Feminists today who rightly condemn the objectification of pervasive pornography rarely stop to consider the way that birth control - viewed as a liberative technology - in fact ushered in our pornographic and objectifying era. There is a willful contradiction at the heart of feminism.

Today, many on the Left are growing increasingly mistrustful and concerned about the natural and social destruction that has been wrought by modern applied sciences and technologies. At the outset of the modern era, it was argued by thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes that the human relationship to the natural world needed to be fundamentally redefined, in particular, that the ancient Aristotelian and Thomistic respect toward the natural law needed be overturned in preference to a conception of nature that was subject to human conquest and dominion. Francis Bacon compared nature to a prisoner who withholds its secrets from its captor - humankind - and that, as a consequence, humanity was justified in the torture of nature to extract its secrets. We are currently reaping the environmental consequences of this particular argument.

The Left is rightly critical of technologies that are destructive of natural and social habitats. Thinkers like Michael Pollan have persuasively argued that the imposition of scientific control over our agricultural system has resulted in the degradation of our food system, the abuse of the earth, the production of inferior and unhealthy food, and the dangerous introduction of agricultural monoculture and the concomitant destruction of bio-diversity (similarly, thinkers on the Right such as Matthew Scully and a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/">Rod Dreher have also condemned industrial agriculture, and the farmer, essayist, novelist and poet Wendell Berry has consistently opposed industrial agricultural, regularly defying political pigeonholing). There have been admirable condemnations of the destruction wrought by the relentless extraction of natural resources, the extensive paving of our world, the excessive reliance upon automobiles, the wastefulness and destructiveness of sprawl, our ceaseless production of waste, and so on. In all these cases, the dangers of scientific control and dominion of the natural world are rightly suspected of leading to a degradation of the natural and social realms.

Yet, when it comes to the matter of extending forms of technological control over our own bodies, most on the Left suddenly abandon their critical suspicions. Unquestioningly, the control of our own bodies is regarded as an unmitigated good - just as unquestioningly as many on the contemporary Right regard the untrammeled exploitation of natural resources ("Drill, Baby, Drill"!) as similarly a requirement of human happiness. If the Right is inconsistent in its refusal to extend its suspicion of sexual license to the economic realm, the Left is similarly inconsistent in a lack of reflection on the destructive consequences of a birth-control (and abortion, and the coming bio-technological) regime upon our social and human environment.

Georgetown - and other Catholic institutions - can do better than simply smuggling one technical aspect of Catholic teaching into its health insurance policy, without explanation or justification. There are good and legitimate grounds for the Catholic position on artificial birth controls, ones that should not be hidden or embarrassedly swept under the rug. In the future, it would be desirable not only to maintain these policies, but to explain and justify them so deeply within the fabric of the institutional life of the university that they will not be a surprise to the likes of the student who was taken unawares by the prohibition, but allowed to be, and to remain, ignorant of the reasons.