SILENT DISSENTER : Jacques Maritain on contraception - twentieth-century French Catholic theologian

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Bernard Doering

"So let us suppose that one day science invents a product which, taken orally in the form of a pill or subcutaneously by injection, renders a woman sterile for a given period of time. Will spouses who use this drug for a proper and acceptable motive and in order to have a child only when their reason tells them it is good to do so be guilty of a moral failing? By no means! Their human reason intervened actively at the same point where with the Ogino method human reason calculated very simply to profit by what nature was doing on its own: it is impossible to see how this could in any way be culpable.

"One may very well ask if technical progress will not eventually find a solution to the great moral problem of birth control, by giving man the means to avoid procreation without altering the act of intercourse in its very exercise in order to turn it away from its proper end. In the past there was no contraceptive technique other than that of Onan. And the regulation of the number of children in families was established by sickness or death (infant mortality). In the future we may very well have contraceptive techniques which will make it possible to avoid procreation, all the while leaving to the sexual act its full normality and its finality in the exercise of that act. And in this case the control of human reason will establish the regulation of the number of children.

"If what I say is correct, the practical casuistic problem would be to determine if some contraceptive method or other alters the act in its very exercise or maintains its full normality, as in the theoretical case I have considered. But the question of principle would be resolved. A doctor whom I consulted on this question (one that is impossible to avoid in the United States) assured me that in his opinion certain of the methods actually in use here pertain to the second category [that is, maintaining full normality] rather than to the first [that is, altering the act in its very exercise]" (III, 977a).

(The notes that Journet sent to Maritain in response to his remarks on birth control are not included in their subsequent exchanges of letters; they may have been lost. The next three letters are from Journet adding details and texts that he had forgotten to put in his lost responses to Maritain.)

In November, Maritain wrote from Princeton concerning his notes on birth control: "It is enormous for me that you do not judge them to be heretical. I know that Casti connubii has an entirely different ring to it. But precisely, if I am right (or better, if we are right) it must be said that this question offers another of those tragic examples where the church defends a truth by blockading it with ways of thinking that simple human experience has left way behind (a l'aveuglette) [that is, like a blind man feeling his way in the dark]. The day when the church would admit such techniques as we are speaking about, nothing would have been changed in its doctrine, but those souls whom the church has completely and fundamentally mobilized against every idea of any technique whatsoever of this kind and in behalf of a philosophy of procreation without any control of reason will understand nothing about this whole question" (III, 985).