The Reasonableness and Beauty of the Teaching of Humanae Vitae

By John M. Haas

The use of contraception by married couples has always been considered morally illicit by the Church. Indeed, it can quite convincingly be argued that it has been infallibly taught by the Church.¹ However, what I want to argue here is that contraception is simply unreasonable. In the final analysis, it is inappropriate behavior for rational human beings.

We must be prepared to explain the reasonableness of Catholicism’s teaching on contraception, especially since the confusion isn’t merely outside the Church. Last year a book was published by a Vatican editorial house that called her position into question. The editor of the book wrote of contraception: “The wise choice will be realized by appropriately evaluating all possible techniques with reference to their specific situation and obviously excluding abortifacient ones.”² But there is no “wise choice” with contraception. I would like to show why contraception is unreasonable and why it inevitably leads to abortion.

Although abortion is far more grave than contraception, both manifest an anti-life mentality by concrete acts which are directed against life. As St. John Paul II pointed out in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are closely connected, as fruits of the same tree.”³ We can, in my opinion, understand why they are linked as fruits of the same tree with a simple understanding of human nature and the nature of human acts.

There was admittedly a period when moral theology was dominated by a legalistic approach which appeared to pit abstract norms against individual conscience. However, the more sound approach to moral theology places the emphasis not on laws and norms but rather on the reasonableness of human behavior in pursuit of happiness. As St. Augustine said: “Everyone wants to be happy. There is no one who will not agree with me on this almost before the words are out of my mouth.”⁴ And happiness is realized in human flourishing as the moral agent acts in accord with the inherent ends of human nature.

In fact, one can see in The Catechism of the Catholic Church that moral theology is primarily concerned with reasonable behavior that conforms to human nature. The Catechism states: “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods.”⁵ The Church considers sin to be constituted by unreasonable behavior which seeks goods in a way that does not conform to our human nature and does not lead to our flourishing.

We know that individuals act for ends which they see as good. In fact, we understand a human being to be acting reasonably (and in a way that leads to flourishing) when he or she acts for an end perceived as good. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us: “The end is the principle in human operations. . . . Therefore, it belongs to the human person to do everything for an end.”⁶ And more simply: “Every agent acts for an end.”⁷ Indeed, the end of an act is what defines what the act is. Beyond that, the end is also what makes any act even possible since one only acts for an end. As T. S. Eliot said, “The end is where we start.”⁸ Again, St. Thomas: “Although the end be the last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent’s intention.”⁹

Let me give an example. I walk through the front door of my house, and someone asks, “What is Haas doing?” If the answer given is, “Walking through the front door of his house,” we know practically nothing. Am I going through the front door of my house to change a flat tire on my car or to go to the airport to catch a plane to Rome? It is the end on behalf of which we act that explains our action and even makes it possible.

The 1917 Code of Canon Law defined marriage in terms of ends: “The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; the secondary end is mutual support and a remedy for concupiscence.”¹⁰ Marriage is defined in terms of its own inherent ends toward which it is naturally ordered and which, thereby, tell us what it is.

As the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan has said: Marriage “is more an incorporation of the finality [or end] of sex than of sex itself. . . . For what is first (i.e., primary) in the ontological constitution of a thing is not the experiential datum but, on the contrary, what is known in the last and most general act of understanding with regard to it.”¹¹

St. Thomas and Bernard Lonergan are not the only ones with this insight. In his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud wrote: “It is a characteristic common to all the (sexual) perversions that in them reproduction as an aim (end) is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse – if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently.” Those sentences could almost have been written by St. Thomas.

Again, human beings are naturally drawn toward ends which they see and perceive as good. Indeed, love can be defined as the spontaneous movement of the will toward that which is good. As St. Thomas says, “Love regards good in general. . .”¹² Men and women are drawn to marriage out of love for the goods which it incorporates, first, the good of children, since that, in the final analysis, explains marriage and the marital act. But men and women are also, in a more immediate sense, drawn to the good of mutual support or friendship which the couple finds in marriage. So, it is the ends of marriage which explain what that institution is and indeed make it possible.

Photo by Emma Bauso // Pexels

This truth was taught by St. Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. The Holy Father admittedly moved away from the use of philosophical terminology in discussing marriage but retained the meaning found in the language of “ends.” He speaks of “the inseparable union, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent in the marriage act.”¹³ The human person cannot break the bond between the unitive and procreative ends of marriage since they constitute the very definition of marriage. And man and woman are naturally drawn to those ends precisely because they are good.

God has endowed every human being with a faculty St. Thomas called synderesis, i.e., the inborn knowledge of the primary principles of moral action. The most concise articulation of the first principle of moral action is “Do good and avoid evil.” Because human behavior is seen to be reasonable when one acts on behalf of ends seen and understood as goods, it is likewise unreasonable to act against a good as though it were an evil. This would, indeed, violate the first principle of the practical reason; it would violate the first principle of morality.

Now, human beings are not obliged to realize all the goods of which they are capable; it is impossible. However, they do have an obligation never to act against a good as though it were an evil because that would be unreasonable; it violates their very nature and synderesis, the first principle of human action, “Do good and avoid evil.” It is here, I believe, that one encounters the immorality, the unreasonableness, the disorder of contraception.

Contraception always involves an act other than the marital act, and that other act is directed specifically against one of the goods (or ends) which actually make sense of the marital act, the procreative good, the child: taking a pill or putting on a condom or inserting a diaphragm or surgically cutting the fallopian tubes. Each of these actions has no other purpose than to be directed against the realization of one of the ends or goods that make sense of, indeed make possible, the marital act. The name of the act itself describes its malice; it is contra, against, the procreative good. Therefore, to engage in an act of contraception is to act in violation of our reasonable nature, which acts on behalf of ends perceived of as goods.

St. Paul VI anticipated that the reasonableness of the teaching of Humanae Vitae would be readily understood and accepted. He wrote: “If each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.”¹⁴

Unfortunately, the effects of literally untold sums of government and foundation money and the relentless actions of national governments and international organizations such as the United Nations, as well as the propaganda of our so-called elite educational institutions, have had the effect of clouding reason and distorting the application of synderesis, so that evil is now seen as good and good is seen as evil.

St. Paul VI acknowledged that not every chosen marital act would or should result in the engendering of new life. Marital intercourse during the infertile period in the wife’s cycle is an obvious example. He taught that a couple could quite legitimately choose to engage in the marital act during those periods if there was a moral obligation to avoid a child at a given moment in their lives, just as they could abstain during fertile periods, since neither involves an act directed against the procreative good inherent in the marital act. Nonetheless, he wrote: “The Church . . . teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.”¹⁵ The significance of these words is clear. When a married couple engages in marital relations during the infertile period, even knowing conception most likely will not occur, they acknowledge that their act nonetheless retains its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. Indeed, that is why they are limiting the marital act to the period of infertility in the wife’s cycle. However, in doing so, they do not act against the procreative good. They simply realize other goods of marriage without acting against any good.

An act of contraception is an act, apart from the marital act, deliberately chosen to be against the procreative good. This is what St. Paul VI meant when he wrote that the married couple “must also recognize that an act . . . which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life.”¹⁶

We also see this judgment in the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii of Pius XI when he decried the rise of both contraception and abortion: “Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.”¹⁷ In other words, the sin lies in engaging the will to act against the procreative good inherent in the act in which the married couple has freely chosen to engage.

When I was a young man in Pennsylvania the sale and distribution of contraceptives was against the law. However, one could still buy condoms. But the packaging stated: “Condoms. Prophylactics. Sold for the prevention of disease only.” The reason condoms could be sold for the prevention of disease was because it was against the law for them to be sold for the prevention of babies! Prophylactics are, of course, devices or medications that work against the spread of disease or infection. What has happened most regrettably over the last several decades is that fertility and the child have themselves come to be seen as diseases which one should act against. Today one can actually read in medical journals of “pregnancy prophylaxis.”

Since synderesis naturally leads us to avoid evil, when an evil does appear, we instinctively act against it to eliminate it. Here we see the inextricable link between contraception and abortion. If we consistently act against the procreative good inherent in the marital act as though it were an evil, when it does appear, despite our best efforts, we take action to eliminate it. That action, of course, has come to be abortion. It is a natural sequel to induced sterility if the sterility fails and the “evil” of fertility manifests itself.

In the fifth century, St. Augustine saw this and wrote of it: “Their [the marital couple’s] licentious cruelty, or their cruel licentiousness, sometimes goes to such lengths as to procure sterilizing poisons, and if these are unavailing, in some way to stifle within the womb and eject the fetus that has been conceived. They want their offspring to die before it comes to life or, if it is already living in the womb, to perish before it is born.”¹⁸ The early Church could see and understand the link that exists between contraception and abortion, so it should not surprise us when we see it in our own day.

In a sense, it was “natural” for Planned Parenthood to go from being an advocate of contraception to being the largest provider of abortion in the world. The child and fertility had come to be seen as evils, as diseases, to be avoided or eliminated.

Indeed, there has never been a society which embraced the general practice of contraception that did not go on to embrace and advocate for abortion. There was a pamphlet issued by Planned Parenthood in 1968 entitled “Plan Your Children for Health and Happiness.” The pamphlet at one place posed the question: “Is birth control abortion?” The answer given by the Planned Parenthood brochure was: “Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a child after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health. It may make you sterile so that when you want a child you cannot have it. Birth control merely postpones the beginning of life.” Today Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortions in the world as the logic of contraception has worked itself out.

There is a veritable material link as well as the philosophical one, between contraception and abortion. There is the fact that many of the methods of birth regulation, which various official governmental agencies have labeled as contraceptives are, in fact, also abortifacients. As a couple tries to assess techniques that might make for a “wise decision” to contracept, they may well be unaware of the medical effects of what they are choosing.

We can also look to the Anglican Church to see the progression from embracing contraception to accepting abortion. In 1920, the Anglican bishops of the world gathered at Lambeth Palace in London and condemned contraception in the strongest terms: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers – physical, moral, and religious – thereby incurred.”¹⁹ Ten years later, in 1930, the bishops of the Anglican Communion were once again gathered at Lambeth. In their deliberations they acknowledged that there were times when married couples should avoid having a child and that the most Christian approach was to abstain from marital intercourse. However, they went on to say, very tentatively, that if abstinence proved impossible, married couples might make use of contraception for a limited period. And at the same time the bishops strongly condemned abortion, stating that the Lambeth Conference “further records its abhorrence of the sinful practice of abortion.”²⁰ But by 1967 the Episcopal Church in the United States, a member of the Anglican Communion, supported legal abortion—before it was even legalized in 1973. And just last summer in 2022, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church passed a resolution, Addressing the erosion of reproductive rights and autonomy, which stated that “all Episcopalians should be able to access abortion services and birth control with no restriction on movement, autonomy, type, or timing.”²¹ It went on, “Resolved, that the 80^th General Convention understands that the protection of religious liberty extends to all Episcopalians who may need or desire to access, to utilize, to aid others in the procurement of, or to offer abortion services.”²²

What the Anglican Church had condemned as a “sinful practice” less than 100 years ago, it is now demanding as a human right with no restrictions. In less than a century, Anglicans went from a reticent approval of contraception to a full-throated demand for universal access to abortion! Both of these practices are fruits of the same tree, as St. John Paul II so clearly saw. And now the Catholic Church is virtually the sole cultural institution holding firm on moral convictions that literally spanned millennia.

I am not suggesting that there is a slippery slope from contraception to abortion. I am maintaining that when one can morally justify the commission of an intrinsically evil act, which the Church has always taught contraception is, we are already at the bottom of the slope and virtually any act can be justified.

To accept the morality of contraception is virtually to accept a false understanding of the human person which leads to the support of other aberrant behaviors that undermine human flourishing. St. John Paul II was emphatic on this when he taught in Familiaris Consortio that there is a profound difference in the understanding of the nature of the human person between those who support contraception and those who accept Catholic teaching. The pope wrote: “It is a difference which is much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.”²³

St. Paul VI and Humanae Vitae courageously stood athwart recent human history to argue forcefully for our very humanity and to call for an acknowledgment of the great good of human life which partially defines what marriage itself is. Humanae Vitae defends the beauty and dignity of human life, as indicated by the very name of the encyclical. It warns against violating in anticipation the good of human life inherent in the marital act and the actual destruction of the good of human life in abortion. The encyclical defends our humanity as reasonable moral agents, a rationality we manifest by never acting against a good as though it were an evil and by exercising self-control for the sake of human goods. The pope wrote: “Self-discipline of this kind is a shining witness to the chastity of husband and wife and, far from being a hindrance to their love of one another, transforms it by giving it a more truly human character.”²⁴

One challenge to Humanae Vitae is the trivialization of the immorality of contraception, as though it could be a “wise decision,” when it is in fact the very gateway to an anti-life mentality and the horrors of abortion.

What we need now is to acknowledge Humanae Vitae, not as a stumbling block, but as a courageous encyclical defending the ineffable beauty and dignity of human life, defending the beauty and dignity of marriage, and, frankly, defending our own humanity. Indeed, what is needed now is for married couples to believe in, and to live out, the truth of this prophetic encyclical.

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Professor John M. Haas, Ph.D., S.T.L., M.Div., is the John Cardinal Krol Professor of Moral Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Philadelphia.

1. See John Ford, Germain Grisez, John Finnis.

2. Etica Theologica della Vita, ed. Vincenzo Paglia, Pontifical Academy for Life.

3. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995, 13.

4. Augustine of Hippo, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae, 3.4.

5. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1849.

6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter ST), 1a2ae, Q. 1, Art. 1, contra.

7. ST, 1a2ae, Q. 1, Art. 2, contra.

8. “Little Gidding.”

9. ST 1a2ae, Q. 1, Art 1.

10. Canon 1013.

11. Bernard Lonergan, “Finality, Love and Marriage”, Theological Studies 4, (1943), 477–510.

12. ST 2a2ae, Q. 25, Art. 1.

13. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (hereafter HV), July 25, 1968, 12.

14. Ibid.

15. HV, 11.

16. HV, 13.

17. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, 56, emphasis added.

18. Augustine of Hippo, Of Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.17.

19. Resolution 68 – Problems of Marriage and Sexual Morality.

20. Resolution 16 - The Life and Witness of the Christian Community – Marriage and Sex.

21. Resolution D083 at the 80^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, July 8–11, 2022, in Baltimore Maryland.

22. Ibid.

23. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981, 32.

24.