A Matter of Culture
Fifty years ago, abrupt marriages of young couples as the result of premarital pregnancies were common, although often hidden, in the United States. If a young man impregnated his girlfriend, the natural and obvious instinct was to quickly marry her and begin his journey towards maturity and fatherhood — regardless of whether the circumstances which prompted that journey were brought about prematurely or not. While the reaction to such a circumstance fifty years ago was most likely to be marriage, the reaction today is often panic. “Unwanted” and “accidental” are the adjectives almost exclusively used to describe such pregnancies, and abortion, unfortunately, is frequently seen as a solution. Our society clearly sees such pregnancies as problems – not as blessings.
Newman Club speaker Professor Janet E. Smith, Chair of Life Issues at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, highlighted this contrast when she returned to Wabash College last month to speak on Catholic doctrine and the “Culture of Life.” What is it which separates the cultures of the young man who marries his pregnant girlfriend and the one who panics and seeks a solution to the “problem?” For Professor Smith, the answer is a matter of life or death.
The phrase “culture of life” was first coined by Pope John Paul II before it was adopted and popularized in American politics by George W. Bush in 2000. It cannot be understood without acknowledgement of its counterpart: the “culture of death.” In her lecture, Professor Smith described the culture of death, which was also first outlined by Pope John Paul II, as the willingness to kill as a solution to a problem. She took pains to make clear that the culture of death has always existed – at least since Cain killed Abel. The existence of murder and war throughout history prove that man has always sought death as a solution to problems. The difference, she said, is in intensity. More people died in the twentieth century than in all the history of mankind. That fact accounts for the born alone. If fetuses were to be added, it would be even more staggering. Americans have generally felt safe from the ravages of the culture of death, being separated from the some of the more violent regions of the world by two large oceans, but when war came to New York City in 2001, that illusory sense of security was shaken. The culture of life is an ideal—an alternative culture worth striving for.
At the beginning of her lecture, Professor Smith gave an abstract in which she explained that she would discuss both the subject of a culture of life versus a culture of death and her trademark issue of contraceptives as well. The two seem, at first glance, to be entirely unrelated. The Wabash Conservative Union had once hoped to join with the Newman Club and organize a pro-life week around Professor Smith’s visit, but, seeing that (at the time) she planned to talk primarily about contraceptives, decided against it. The issue seemed more doctrinal than political, and not worth organizing a pro-life week around. That decision, in retrospect, may have been a bit premature. Professor Smith made the case that the widespread use of contraceptives has actually contributed to the culture of death, at least when it comes to abortions.
She argued that before the widespread availability of contraceptives, there was a certain stability in matters of sex and the family structure. Sex, love, babies, and marriage were notions that were all intertwined. Sex was for the purpose of having babies, marriage for the purpose of raising babies, and love, the enabler of both. Today those notions are scrambled. Sex is for the purpose of having fun, marriage has to be encouraged through tax incentives, and babies can be seen as an inconvenience to both. The focus has shifted from the good of the family to the selfish desires of the individual. And what caused the scrambling of these traditional notions? Professor Smith points to contraceptives. By separating the concepts of sex and childbearing, contraceptives encouraged selfishness in society. Thus, when a young man impregnates his girlfriend, he no longer thinks of family. He thinks of himself.
But the wedge between sex and childbearing is an artificial one. Nothing has really changed. The biological process works the same way it always has. When contraceptives fail, the result will be children. As Professor Smith pointed out, when a man “accidentally” gets someone pregnant, something did not go wrong. Something went right.
So is the answer to ban contraceptives? Professor Smith is too realistic to believe that. They are engrained in our society irreversibly. What she advocates is, in essence, an attempt to recapture a lost culture — to reconnect the notions of sex, love, babies, and marriage. Doing that is a difficult task, and the answer to how it is done is unclear. But it is clear, at least to many, how it is not done. It is not done by obsessing over condoms in grade school education. It is not done by shunning abstinence first programs. It is not done by perpetuating the idea that sexuality is entirely for the pleasure of the individual.
Teaching the notion that sex has consequences, physical and emotional, that no invention of man can perfectly prevent — that is real sex education. Until the traditional model of the family is reconstructed, the culture of life will not be realized.
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