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Sacred Sperm
by Jan Brazill
| Without contraception, the average woman would bear between 12 and 15 children in her lifetime. |
So wouldn't you think, in this modern world where unintended pregnancies can thrust a family into poverty, contraception would be considered a good thing? |
Yet some pharmacists are choosing not to fill prescriptions for contraceptives for women customers. Four states have passed laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraception, and bills protecting such refusals have been introduced in 15 others. Women in all states who rely on birth control pills should check their drugstores to assure that management requires such pharmacists to offer referrals to other sources. |
What possesses anyone to oppose such (in many cases, life-saving) medicine? As in many roadblocks to science, the answer is "religion." |
Catholic popes have long opposed artificial contraception, calling it an unnatural function. (The same men have accepted all the other discoveries of modern medicine for themselves, however.) Some Evangelicals have followed suit -- Randall Terry says that contraception encourages people to "use each other" - and pandering politicians deny family planning funding to satisfy the Catholic demands. |
For the fifth straight year, President Bush, obliging such opponents, has denied funds to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), making ours the only major industrialized nation refusing to contribute to this family-planning Fund. The UNFPA estimates that the $34 million for one year would have prevented 800,000 abortions, as well as 4,700 maternal deaths, 77,000 infant deaths, and as many as two million unwanted pregnancies. (This in a world whose numbers have already reached 6.5 billion with over half its population in their reproductive years!) |
What is behind the Church's opposition to artificial means to limit births? Does it believe, as the ancients did, that each individual sperm contains a tiny, perfectly formed human being, which only needs the fertile womb of a woman to grow? This is the reason the Old Testament condemns masturbation as the wasting of this precious "seed." The men who wrote the Bible considered their sperm to be sacred! |
Modern science enlightens us with a completely different scenario of human development. The Catholic Church takes advantage of this knowledge to devise the rhythm method -- a way of avoiding unwanted pregnancies by limiting sexual intercourse to times of infertility. Its logic in allowing this control of natural functions, while condemning chemical (as in birth-control pills) or barrier (as in condoms) methods, is difficult to understand. Saying one is "natural" doesn't justify the differentiation unless you allow that the Church's method doesn't suppress semen, which means sperm must still be revered as sacred. |
It is also difficult to reconcile the Church's approval of the rhythm method with its insistence that every act of intercourse must be open to the transmission of life, since the rhythm method encourages intercourse on "safe" days when pregnancy is knowingly impossible to establish. |
The human female has a decided advantage over other female animals by having the capacity to enjoy sexual intimacy at any point in her monthly cycle, rather than only during "oestrus" -- the fertile period. Modern contraceptives permit couples this experience without worry about fertile periods whose timing can vary. Religions who deny the use of contraceptives reduce humans to the primitive level of animals, keeping them enslaved to their biological nature. |
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