Question:
Dear sirs: I believe that many laws exist that are not applicable to modern life and that should be updated by the hierarchy of the Church. I am very concerned about contraception. As a married woman, I believe I have the right to decide my life; I don’t think it is against any law to avoid pregnancy. Should I get pregnant every year, until my body can’t take it, and I die in childbirth or have all the complications that a pregnancy has: have children I can’t raise, not be able to study, lead a life dedicated to raising children and not be able to hold a job, be discriminated against by society and not be employed by my state? I have a very high concept of women and I don’t like to hear that women are some kind of sinful object, a stain, a thing or evil object. I would like to receive from you an answer to my doubts or feedback of what I have expressed. Thank you very much for your attention.
Response:
The Church has the highest esteem for women, as you can see by reading the papal documents that address this: (for example, the letter Mulieris dignitatem, on the dignity of the woman, by Pope John Paul II). Moreover, she has a higher concept of woman (and of man) than many who call for freedoms for women that in fact do not liberate but rather enslave them.
An essential part of a woman’s dignity is knowing how to respect herself and be respected. To respect herself is to know her proper truth, to know what she is in the divine plan and to respect God’s plan for her. This plan is admirably engraved in her deepest structures, her psychology, her spirituality and in her biology. By respecting God’s plan for woman, she respects herself can bring herself to the highest dignity.
Contraception separates two elements that God has desired to be together in the exercise of human sexuality: the union of the spouses (always actual) and parenthood (not always actual but often only potential, as foreseen by nature itself). By separating both dimensions, sexuality is distorted. Just as it is an aberration to desire motherhood without love (as occurs in the sexual act exercised with violence, or with contempt, or for profit or pleasure, but without love), equally it is an aberration to desire the exercise of sexuality without total donation to the other person (donation that is total when it also includes the procreative potency, as nature foresees it for the moment in which sexuality is exercised).
This is the reason why the Church, out of respect for the natural law and therefore out of respect of man and woman, condemns contraception.
Even more, contraception is part of the logic of the culture of death; in fact, it is the mother of abortion and of the rejection of life. And to make of a person an anti-life mentality is the worst abasement to which someone can be subjected.
This does not imply enslaving woman to constant childbearing, becoming pregnant time after time. Knowledge of the biological rhythms (and therefore, of God’s wise plans) allows her to recognize and identify the moments in which she is fertile and the times when she is not; either to decide to exercise the conjugal sexuality in the moments of fertility (seeking to become a mother) or to restrict herself for serious reasons to times of infertility by distancing pregnancies. This is the core of the natural methods.
Rest assured that you will never be more of a woman than when you respect the plan of God who made Woman.
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