The Pill: A Good Thing for Conservative Catholics
Quick question for people: Do you do the right thing for its own sake? To get into Heaven? To avoid Hell?
This is a question I've try to ask myself as often as I remember, and a question I hope Catholics (and everyone frankly) ask themselves. I wonder if they ask themselves that question very often, however. At least, based on their opinions of the birth control pill (Pill).
The Typical Argument
The Typical Argument for conservatives who blame the Pill for the Sexual Revolution is as follows:
1. Couples before the Pill abstained until marriage because of the fear of the woman getting pregnant
2. As a result, couples often got married earlier, spent their adulthood together, and thrived as a result of early marriage and the nuclear family
3. The Pill was the impetus for a vast period of sexual unrest because women, who usually were the gatekeepers on matters of sex before marriage because they had the bulk of the negative consequences, no longer had negative consequences
4. The period of sexual unrest was bad
5. Therefore, the Pill is bad
Often, conclusions cite women as the gatekeepers of sexual morality in a sense, though many don't use that language. I do, however, think they go that far. (Not all conservative arguments which advise that we wait for marriage go that far, and I like other arguments. However, this is a Typical Argument for those which blame the Pill specifically for the Sexual Revolution.)
The Typical Argument as I've described it here is obviously unsound in terms of academic philosophy. But most political writers aren't engaging with us in the middle of a formal logic course. What they're doing is making a linear, apologetic argument from preexisting religious beliefs. I don't think I picked samples which were outside of the general mainstream of very conservative individuals who don't like birth control, but feel free to prove me wrong.(1,2,3) There's a book entitled Mind, Heart, and Soul coming out at the end of October that has a compilation arguments against the Pill and which has the thesis that the Pill was responsible for destroying much of familial culture in the US, but that book isn't out yet. So, if there's a correction, I'll wait until after that book comes out to see if I've gotten the argument wrong, but I don't think I'm out of line here in describing the argument as I have above.
And I don't think it's entirely a bad argument. It's certainly not my style, overly thorough and filled with sub-points upon sub-points upon sub-points, but it's certainly not unfounded. And there is observational evidence that marriage changed significantly before and after the pill.
Based on the data in Fig. 1, we can see that the marrying age of women has definitely risen since the early 1900's. It's intriguing that it lowered for a bit as we entered the 20th century, but certainly the numbers today are much higher than what we saw in the 1890s. Additionally, we can see that a lot of this age hike occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, since it remained relatively stable at 20.n for much of the 60s. It was already rising by the late 60s, and that's entirely consistent with this conservative argument I presented above.
Additionally, I looked at the citations of many conservative pundits (including (2) below) and found a landmark study conducted by Drs. Akerlov and Leneen.(5) Here's one of their major findings:
This data is consistent with the conservative argument I've described above. However, it's observational, not causal, because you can't make a causal case for Akerlov's and Leneen's argument. They have, however, presented pretty compelling evidence. Essentially, they argue that the Pill dramatically decreased the number of shotgun weddings in the United States. They've termed the the Pill and abortion "reproductive technology shock." And I can't argue with that figure: the onset of the Pill did coincide with a drop in shotgun weddings.
I've also found similar evidence elsewhere.(6) A series of longitudinal studies conducted in the 70s found that the rates of premarital sex definitely increased from the end of the 1950s (before the Pill was authorized for commercial sale by the FDA) to the end of the 1960s. Relevant to the above data, these studies also found that the rate changed more in women than it did in men, and that the percentage of nonvirgins in male subjects was approximately the same in some cases.
However, while the effects are rather dramatic, the hatred of the Pill has always seemed to me to be an argument in favor of the practical reasons to abstain for marriage, not an argument in favor of the moral reasons to wait for marriage.
The Uterus as Gatekeeper
Gatekeepers are typically defined as some structure, institution, etc. which prevents a group of people from gaining access to something. In this case, women would be the group of people wanting access to sex the way men can have it--without forethought or afterthought. (Note: I say can here because I recognize that many men did and do not behave in this manner. Nevertheless, the option is open.) If we accept the premise of the Typical Argument against the Pill, what it really seems then, is that a woman's uterus was her gatekeeper. It kept her from being able to access sex the way a man did, because she immediately felt the consequences of that. And (fortunately) because American society promoted marriage, there were a lot of shotgun weddings as a result.
However, a gatekeeper isn't the same as a moral argument. Those making the argument I've described above are really just arguing against women being able to be free of consequences, not against having sex before marriage. And the fact that the Pill so radically changed the culture in the 1960s and 1970s is evidence that people weren't really into the moral argument when it was released.
We see this in two places:
1. The rate of male premarital sexual activity. I would argue that this is evidence that the moral argument for waiting until marriage had pretty much worn down by 1960. The counterargument is, of course, that this is just a more difficult sin for men to overcome and that their higher libido in this case makes them weaker. I could see that argument, but allow me to present my second piece of evidence:
2. The prevalence of females having sex before marriage, in the event that they married that partner. In a longitudinal analysis of data taken from a previously-conducted 1955 study, Ben Ard found that 45% of male respondents and 39% of female respondents had had premarital sex.(7) (I will concede that this 6% difference could result from the counterargument to 1. Some people are more prone to certain sins than others.) However, what is remarkable is that 39% of women were doing it, just so long as they had a practical way out. Ard broke his results down by behavior:
Women, it appears, were just fine with having sex before marriage so long as the relationship was sufficiently serious.
So the real culprit for the sexual revolution is, who exactly? Because I'm not seeing evidence that the Pill is actually breaking down any arguments for waiting until marriage. Rather, it looks as though people were fine with having sex before marriage, so long as nobody got "in trouble," and if someone did, well, marriage was always a solution to that problem.
The Pill as a "Good Thing"
I asked at the beginning of this essay whether we do the right thing because we want to do the right thing or because we want to get out of hell (or get into heaven). Obviously, I think we should be doing the right thing. And that means waiting until marriage not because there are negative consequences if we don't, but because it's the right thing to do. And if we're going to advocate for abstinence until marriage for religious reasons, then we actually need to commit to that. Blaming the Pill is simply blaming the fact that we no longer have a great practical "don't go to Hell" argument to sell people on for why we should wait until marriage. And I think that the people making the Typical Argument do know this on some level, because they stress things like the importance of the nuclear family and how waiting for marriage is generally good, and they wouldn't make statements like that if they weren't being true to their faith.
Ultimately, this is why I think we need to cut the Typical Argument blaming the pill out of our repertoire. And if an atheist insurance company wants to insure atheist birth control, etc. that's not the time for us to bitch and moan about how the Pill has ruined everything. It's the time to make our moral arguments about why waiting for marriage is a great thing, and how it helps families. (This isn't to say that you can't still use statistics about how nuclear families are incredibly stable and lead to happy and productive children, but blaming the Pill is entirely contrary to our argument.) Frankly, I think defaulting to the practicality argument for so long is what made it so easy for the Pill to change the sexual culture in the US in the first place, and the Church needs to abandon that argument as soon as possible is what if it actually wants to stand on its own two feet again regarding sexual morality. I'm looking at you, Matt Walsh.
What the Typical Argument attacks is what it sees as the origin of hookup culture. But if the Pill is only the practical origin of hookup culture, what's the moral origin? I can't say, and I think pointing to one specific thing will make me a bit of a hypocrite, since I just called that out for this entire post. But rebelling against the 1950s standards, Vietnam, dealing with parents who had shell-shock from WWII, the sort of instant gratification that can come from a good economy with cheap goods, and a lack of spiritual education are all potential causes. And I'm sure there are more. What I'm saying is that the Pill didn't make it okay to sin. It just made sin accessible.
And here's where we get to my more controversial argument (see? no clickbait): I like the Pill because it reveals our weak points. If American culture had been primed to wait for marriage, it might have affected a small percentage of secular youth, but it wouldn't have taken over the culture in the way it did. When women who are religious go on the Pill en masse, that's not a failure of the Pill, or just of the women. It's the failure of the individuals making the poor choices, women AND men, and it's a failure on the part of the church for apparently not teaching that lesson. The Pill was less of a technological shock which upended a perfectly good culture and more of a normally harmless virus infecting and then killing someone who was immunocompromised. That person would have been fine in any other scenario, but because he was sick, down he went.
That was my argument. Here's an aside: If there are people who argue that women necessarily have to be the gatekeepers for this particular sin because apparently men can't control themselves, I want to head them off at the pass. I'm not going to go full SJW and say that it's not more difficult for one sex over another. While there is variability between the sexes, on average men have a much higher libido, and this (again, on average) makes it more difficult for them to have self-control. However, what I'm arguing is that we need to treat this sin like we do other sins. The Catholic Church doesn't believe that Eve was the only one who sinned because she was the one to pick the fruit first and that Adam was faultless because she tempted him. No. Adam had the same choice, to sin or not sin, and whether he resisted temptation or fell into it is on him. Regardless of whether a sin is personally a bit easier for you to commit because it's more tempting, you can't pass the sin off on someone else, or on a Pill. And this is true for women as well. I don't think anyone has any data on which sins are more tempting by sociological group, but I personally know that of the 7 deadly sins, some of them are more tempting for me than others. And that isn't the fault of the additional temptations in my life that make them more difficult to resist, it's my fault for falling into them, if I do.
References
1. http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/07/welch.sex.pill/index.html?hpt=C2 It's Sex O'Clock in America
2. http://www.returnofkings.com/86740/how-abortion-and-birth-control-destroyed-traditional-families How Abortion and Birth Control Destroyed Traditional Families
3. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/04/30/fools-or-liars/ Fools or Liars?
4. https://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/ms2.pdf Age of First Marriage
5. https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/
6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/351823.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4ae04be05264374ba035326768fe071f
7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3811744.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4692d942246d26139ce2b6ea59167c0f Premarital Sexual Experience