Contraception and 'Technology'

Cultivating attentiveness to our flesh + ACCESS ENDING

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What is the difference between using a ‘technology’ like the pill to prevent conception, and using (say) an app or some other form of advanced charting to track one’s cycles—the so-called fertility awareness based methods of timing conception? 

It is tempting to think that these are, in effect, the same sorts of processes. As a reader recently put it to me, “If one is using a tracking method that involves an app on a phone, then one is allowing a ‘technology’ to intervene into the process (and of course a device that is more often used for evil than good and has been societally extremely detrimental).” Opposing hormonal contraception or other means while approving of such means seems inconsistent. 

There is certainly a danger in fertility-awareness based methods of allowing them to become a type of technique, in which sexuality is regarded as a mere instrument for the sake of some end beyond the communion of persons. This is especially true, I think, for couples who are trying to conceive: they face the challenge of not reducing their sexual lives entirely to their efforts to bring about a child. 

Yet there are also deep differences between them, which matter for couples who maintain an ‘in principle’ openness to having children. 

For one, hormonal contraceptives introduce a contradiction in the will: the use of contraceptives is inherently a choice against the end of having children, regardless of what form, while engaging in the act that would bring children about during the time when conception might be likely. The choice to abstain from intercourse during such a time might be done for the same reasons—but there is no internal contradiction, no attempt to choose the act which would make children likely while concurrently choosing against children. 

This leads to a second crucial difference, which is closely related. The choice to abstain in some seasons is a choice to work with the grain of sex and its natural rhythms. While it might not be a choice to generate life, it is a choice to honor life’s intrinsic ends and reproductive orientation, by not attempting to get the pleasures that come with that orientation without the reproduction. While fertility-awareness based methods might seem like a technology, they are one which drives us deeper into and nearer to the natural form of our sexuality, rather than allowing us to bypass it altogether through the use of contraception. 

To that extent, the moral question of contraception is not whether a particular ‘technology’ has been useful or not to society as a whole, as my interlocutor suggested. Were it so, it would indeed make sense to not use cell phones and automobiles. The social and moral question is whether technologies have the means of making us more human, of connecting us to our natures as embodied creatures, or whether they allow us to short-circuit the ends that are built in to who we are. 

None of this entails that one must have as many children as possible, or spacing procreation is illegitimate. The norm governing sex is: maintain an openness to children, and conform ourselves to the time of God’s good creation which is embedded within the bodies that he has given us. Contraception manages to violate both dimensions of that, by enacting a choice against children and detaching us from our bodies. 

The use of technology to reconnect us to our humanness is, of course, contentious. And we might think there is something unseemly or unfitting about it. After all, if we are to live in conformity to the rhythms of our flesh, would we not be better to simply take what we are given and not seek help from our smartphones?

I confess I have never felt the force of such a worry—whether we are talking about fertility-awareness based methods of regulating our sexual lives, or implementing technological controls on our access to the internet. Such technologies reorient our attention: they force us to become aware of aspects of the world and our lives that we would likely forget otherwise, thanks to the soporific effect our massively mediated world has upon us. We forget what it is like to wait quietly in line, because we constantly have music in our earbuds. It might diminish our heroism if we turn such tools against themselves, and create ways of reminding ourselves of what it is like to go through a day uninterrupted by Twitter. Yet, like children, such external constraints might be necessary for us to rediscover the goods that we stand in danger of losing. 

The same can be said about fertility-awareness based methods. While many of them use apps and other tracking devices, such technologies recenter our attention upon the lived experience of our biology—and prompt us to reimagine what it means to love one another within its confines and limits. 

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Around the Web

This is an excellent essay from Freddie de Boer on why postmodern religion makes no sense.

Bethany Mandel is expecting kid #6 in a few months, after not wanting any.

I can attest that this gets pretty close to what happens when people stop drinking alcohol.

The Penultimate Word

You though, all of you who are rich in this world, do what the apostle advises: let them be rich, he says, in good works; let them give easily (1 Tim. 6:18). Why should it be difficult, after all, when the means for giving easily is there? So let them give easily, let them share. Let them too have something, but let them give to the needy; let them both help a comrade and unburden themselves.

You rich man, the poor man has been appointed your comrade in this life. You see him in difficulties by not having things, yourself in difficulties by having things. In not having things he has nothing to support him; you, in having much, have what weighs down. Supply his lack, and diminish your load. That's why it says let them share. The same apostle, you see, says you in another place Not that there should be relief for others, difficulty for you (2 Cor 8:13). So, let them share. Let them have, but what they have over let them share.

In this way they keep what's enough, and don't lose whatever they give. They will possess more than what they keep, which they will leave behind them here, or use up by spending. But as for what they give away, listen to the same text on what becomes of it. It continues, Let them store up for themselves a good foundation in the future, that they may lay hold of true life (1 Tm 6:19). So what's so terrific about what you have given away, if you have already made arrangements to emigrate from this place, where everything perishes?