Of Ability and Will

Jill's got a really great and thoughtful post breaking down Christian arguments against the use of birth control in response to a Christian man's contraceptive dilemma.

One of the most interesting parts of the piece addresses the fundamental inconsistency between a rejection of contraception use in favor Natural Family Planning and other ways in which we casually interfere all the time in big and small ways with the natural course our bodies would take:

[W]hat doesn’t make sense to me is the idea that NFP is acceptable, but vasectomies, tubal ligations and condom use aren’t. Either interference with God’s plan for your life and His design of your body is wrong, or it’s not. … After all, cancer occurs naturally, but I don’t think that most Christians would argue that we should just sit back and let God’s plan take its course. We alter God’s design all the time — we cut out hair, trim our fingernails, put on make-up, remove our facial and body hair, get braces, pierce our ears. Perfectly healthy people give their blood, or their bone marrow, or even one of their bodily organs (like a kidney) to people who need those things to survive — people who, without human interference into God’s plan, would be dead. How it is acceptable to give up a functioning, healthy kidney — part of the body God gave you — but not acceptable to alter your reproductive system so that you do no further harm to your body or your partner’s body?

…Anti-contraception people will argue that contraceptives, vasectomies, and other pregnancy-prevention techniques are bad because they screw around with a healthy reproductive system, unlike, say, an appendectomy or chemotherapy, which seek to correct disease. But, as I wrote above, we constantly take steps which alter perfectly healthy bodily functions so that our lives are easier, or so we fit a social standard of acceptable physical appearance (hence making our lives easier).

One of the curious things about both sides of this argument, by the way, is that they're predicated on the presumption that a psychological readiness for more children isn't part of a "healthy reproductive system." The man whose problem serves as the basis of Jill's post is married to a woman who is terrified of getting pregnant again.

Shaping his perspective is his wife, who did not want to become pregnant after her second child, but did anyway, despite non-medical efforts at prevention. Before her third pregnancy, she was suffering from postpartum depression. She wanted to go back to work. She thought that having another child would be a “disaster.” She asked her husband to get a vasectomy, and he wouldn’t. She would only have sex with him once a month, the day after her period ended. She slept on the couch so that she wouldn’t be tempted into sex. And when she found out she was pregnant again, she sobbed, and was “devastated.”

…It’s been 15 months since this couple has so much as cuddled, let alone had sex. They both want to — but the wife is so terrified of another pregnancy, another difficult delivery, another C-section, another long recovery — that it’s not worth it.

Only by divorcing totally a woman's will to reproduce from her ability to reproduce could this woman be described as having a "healthy reproductive system."

In the same way that the most important sex organ is the brain, the most important reproductive organ ought to be the brain, too. A mind unwilling to reproduce attached to a body capable and likely to reproduce is a malfunctioning reproductive system when mind and body are taken as a whole system—and the only way to treat it is with contraception. A refusal to do so is really about denying a woman's agency, disregarding her choice, divorcing her will from her ability, even when those two are at odds.

Being a sexually active woman who can have children but doesn't want to have children isn't a disease (at least not to most people, heh), but it nonetheless needs a cure. Birth control is a cure. A simple one. One that addresses the conflict between will and ability that most women will face sometime in their lives. If you believe in medical treatment, and believe women should want to become mothers when they do, it's really no more complicated than that.