What Cherie Blair says about Church teaching on contraception is not new. But just in case you live in a cave, here it is in a nutshell.
“If you look at what progress women have made in the world, one of the reasons they have been able to make progress is because they have been able to control their fertility,” said the wife of the former British prime minister. “I personally don’t think there is anything wrong with that, and indeed without being able to control that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve the things that I’ve been able to do. I think it’s a really important issue and I would prefer it if the Catholic Church took a more positive attitude towards contraception because I think there’s a lot of difference between preventing a life coming about and actually extinguishing a life when it has come about.”
Everyone get that? Because women use birth control, they achieve, therefore birth control is good. There isn’t that much to the argument really. But I want to make sure that it is laid out. Cherie goes on to say that it’s not like she’s killing anyone.
In this short quote, there are three problems with her reasoning that I would like to point out.
First, there is a factual problem. Some birth control methods, including the pill, the IUD and others, actually do kill the woman’s offspring. Sorry, Cherie your facts are just wrong. Some birth control DOES extinguish life. Click here for more information on this if you are interested.
Second, there is a a problem with using means-end thinking with morality. When trying to solve a problem that does not bring into question right and wrong, means-end thinking is just fine. But when we reach a point of right and wrong, it fails. What Cherie does is offer a substitute moral system that replaces an understanding of the morality or immorality of acts with a judgments based on outcomes. But not just specific outcomes, because I am certain that no one would argue that birth control ALWAYS produces a good outcome. No, she adopts a sociological approach. So, in Cherie’s system we would we get a bunch of secular experts to identify what is “best” and then identify methods that will produce that best, and then say that it must be moral.
This is a morally bankrupt position. We cannot justify an evil act because it produces a good. If a city was about to riot because it wanted a particular person thought guilty of a crime executed, but that person was in fact innocent, executing the person would still be wrong. This would be true even if doing so stopped the mob from killing more than just one person. Similarly, it is always wrong to conduct potentially harmful experiments (medical, psychological or otherwise) on people without their knowledge or consent no matter what positive science might see. Using ends to justifies means does not work when it comes to moral issues – we must account for the inviolability of the person, and when dealing with Catholic teaching, we also must deal with God’s will which we discern through Sacred Scripture and Tradition in the light of Church teaching. If Cherie Blair wants to genuinely engage Church teaching, she needs to dig deeper. Using an appeal to means-end reasoning is like trying to address a math proof with a chainsaw. Makes a lot of noise, impresses the crowd, but is just sound and fury.
Finally, Cherie holds a false assumption. Cherie assumes that to control one’s fertility requires the use of artificial birth control. That is simply a not true. There are two alternatives that are not morally objectionable, natural family planning and abstinence. If achievement is in fact more important than being a mother, then there are alternatives other than immoral acts.
What Cherie is really saying – though it lays underneath her argument, is that sex is too important to have any consequences. In fact, her moral system has a clear hierarchy: first sexual pleasure, then financial status (she says “achieve”), and then, maybe, motherhood – though that is strictly optional and not to interfere with either of the previous priorities. We can see that this is her model because she seeks to divorce sex from all consequences. Sex clearly comes before finances and achievement, because if achievement were higher, then sex would be sacrificed to that touted good. As it stands, only one thing is sacrificed – motherhood. Openness to new life comes after sexual pleasure, then money. Seems kind of selfish to me.
And she wants the Church to endorse that model?
