Question 125

HOW DR. DOMINIC PEDULLA, MD, EXPLAINS THE EVIL OF CONTRACEPTION

 The wisdom of this design is real wisdom, something that can be considered apart from questions properly dealing with issues of right and wrong, and questions of sin, because it is a design intended to lead to human happiness and well-being. Normally, we don’t understand and appreciate such a design in its totality until it is fractured and destroyed by deliberate sin, and the results become obvious. Until that time, it is like a skillful referee in an athletic contest. If he is doing his job correctly, he is hardly noticed. 

For instance, considering the mother-child relationship, it is very easy to see that sexuality’s design favors the well-being of both, since the conjugal act is a moment of deep unconditional choosing of the other, and the acceptance of the other at a deep level of being but, this is not possible without also choosing to remain open to life, at least according to the normal design of sexuality. This type of “anthropology” favors the woman’s self-esteem and her ability to incorporate and integrate the baby into her sense of who she is as a woman, i.e. a mother not just the woman. Additionally, if she is not contraceptive, the acceptance of her procreative potential as part of her normal sexual identity ensures also that she cannot be had “on the cheap” or to put it positively, that the man must accept her in her totality.

From the standpoint of the baby, nature has seen to it that the deepest and most intimate, unconditional surrender of love cannot happen apart from dealing with the question of openness to a potential baby. God wanted the moment of choosing new life to be one and the same moment as that of choosing one’s soul-mate and spouse at a very deep level.

The two types of choosing are now locked together inseparably and this is what I mean when I say is not just a question of right or wrong, but rather a question of the way we are in our natures, an arrangement the acceptance of which is necessary to avoid causing inevitably deep discord in marriage and society. Thus abortion follows contraception like the night follows the day, and it is because of the deep personal de-valuing or de-personalization that first comes in the contraceptive act, where the woman is not accepted in her totality – no, that’s too mild a description; it’s more than that, it’s that she is betrayed actively because of betrayal of trust -- an act where her totality is laid bare in a kind of existential or psychological nakedness (The physical nakedness is a kind of outward sign of this more existential nakedness).

After contraceptive de-personalization, the abortion choice is or can be viewed as, at least in part, a desperate attempt at re-personalization by “blanking out” or denying the humanity of the fetus. In other words, the fetus is de-personalized in a desperate and impossible attempt to re-personalize herself, and this is the foundational basis, examined existentially, of recourse to induced abortion.

And our study moreover found that tubal ligation causes sexual dysfunction in the same way that women experience sexual dysfunction surrounding intercourse outside of marriage. Of course it does, because it is like a “de-composing” of the constitutive or component elements of her total acceptance, so that now (and this is what people used to intuitively understand when they said women shouldn’t be used and they should have respect for themselves and for their bodies) a sham kind of acceptance that is really rejection at a deep level takes place, fueling as contraception does the drive for divorce, and if not divorce then the hostility that inevitably creeps into these marriages.