As of August 1, most new and renewing health insurance plans must begin offering a spectrum of women’s preventive health services, including birth control, at no upfront cost. This provision of the Affordable Care Act has been among its most controversial, with many Catholic and other religious organizations suing the government to block a rule that they see as compelling them to act in opposition to their beliefs, which they represent as steadfast through time.
This improbable reemergence of contraception as a public issue in the public square turned our attention to John T. Noonan’s Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. The book was originally published in 1965 and then enlarged back in 1986, but despite its age there seems to exist no comparable treatment of the entire history of the church and contraception, from the Roman Empire to Vatican II. One could argue that no such work could even be attempted today, as anyone with the access Noonan then enjoyed would today almost surely be censured for their effort.
On publication, Time called the book a “magisterially documented history of church teaching on birth control [which] suggests that there are good reasons why the traditional stand can change,” and Harper’s described it as a work of “inherent genius” that was as “truly exciting as a book can be.” In a post earlier this year, the U.S. Intellectual History blog detailed the roiling debate into which Noonan’s book entered in the mid-1960s.
What follows below is adapted from Noonan’s original Introduction to the book.
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“Contraception” is a term which could be applied to any behavior that prevents conception. Sexual continence is contraceptive in effect; sexual intercourse when an ovum will not be fertilized avoids procreation as much as intercourse where a physical barrier is used to prevent the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum. How has some behavior now generally approved by Catholic moralists been discriminated from other acts of contraception which have been condemned?
My focus is on the ideas and values clustered into a doctrine on contraception. Seen from one aspect, the doctrine is a reply to the question, “On what terms may the generation of human life be controlled?” Considered from another aspect, it is an answer to the question, “Under what conditions may human beings have sexual intercourse?” From another, it responds to the inquiry, “What revelation of God or what laws of nature are relevant to sexual conduct?”
There is an advantage to looking at a single set of concepts over two thousand years. As an attempt to set out what the purposes of sexual behavior should be, the tradition I explore uniquely combines appeals to divine instruction, natural laws, and psychological and social consequences. Is there any comparable effort, assiduously sustained within the same general framework for over nineteen hundred years, to express in rational terms a standard of sexual behavior?
The meaning of theory, however, is properly understood only when one determines what conditions it responds to. Consequently, I have described the contraceptive means known to different eras, and what can be inferred as to their diffusion and employment. The theory, then, will not be viewed as an abstract logic developed without reference to existing habits. I shall set out both the practice to which doctrine responded and the steps taken to alter the practice. The effort at enforcement tested the seriousness with which the theory was intended. Unlike a history of secular law, however, where the meaning of a rule may be measured by its effective sanctions, the history of a moral doctrine must be, chiefly, an account of what was taught. The application of a moral rule is effected primarily not by agencies of compulsion but by an individual's accepting it in his heart. If a moral teaching is violated, it may still have been “effective” if it played a part in the moral consciousness of the violator. The diffusion of a moral doctrine, and the external embodiment and enforcement of it, may be gauged; the principal effect of the doctrine, its effect on conscience, must largely be inferred from the terms in which it is proposed.
The believers to whom a moral doctrine is addressed will range from the devout to the conformists to the rebellious. Partly as a function of faith, partly as a function of other psychological attributes such as attitude to authority, partly as a function of social environment, the acceptance of the doctrine will vary. At no time, I suppose, has a specific moral teaching put forward by the theologians been received in an identical way by all the faithful. The seriousness with which a doctrine is taken by different persons and groups is a matter of estimate. The range of reaction in the audience may be presumed to have affected the enunciation of the doctrine itself. When the theologians speak to a community of various degrees of faith, various degrees of moral sensitivity, various degrees of education, they may use language unsuitable for more intimate dialogue, and, in the words of the Talmud, they may ''build a fence around the Law,” setting up outer ramparts to keep an inner treasure secure.
The assent of human beings, which gives effect to a doctrine, is not to a single set of propositions, but to the Christian faith. Within this faith there are beliefs on the Bible, grace, original sin, the sacraments, sexuality, marriage, the value of human lives, the purpose of human existence. These beliefs or doctrines structure the propositions on contraception. However tight the relation, however close the dependence on the Christian framework, the teaching on contraception has had its own set of problems, concepts, articulations: its own history.