The euphoria with which pro-life citizens greeted the 2022 Dobbs decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, has faded in the two years since then. As Monica Klem points out in a recent article on National Review’s website, although several state legislatures have passed laws restricting abortion in various ways, every pro-life ballot measure facing a direct popular vote since Dobbs has failed. Five decades of practically unlimited abortion have created a culture in which most U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal under at least some circumstances. And they have been registering that opinion at the ballot box.

An independent scholar and historian, Klem is the co-author of a book called Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America (reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci in the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of the Human Life Review). In it, Klem and co-author Madeleine McDowell recount the period after the Civil War, when women’s-rights advocates used their experience with the abolitionist movement not only to pursue women’s right to vote but to exert moral suasion to change cultural attitudes and lead to laws restricting abortion. Now that pro-life legal efforts to restrict abortion are running into opposition, Klem recommends taking a cue from the era of Susan B. Anthony. Instead of focusing primarily on laws that will prove unpopular as soon as they are passed, she encourages pro-life organizations to “devote more creative energy to finding ways to change public opinion on abortion at the local, regional, and national levels.” To do that, we need to identify as precisely as possible what public opinion is based on.

Carl Trueman, an ecclesiastical historian at Grove City College, has published a penetrating analysis of the mindset that leads to, among other things, the opinion that abortion should be freely available to all women. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he shows how cultures that abandon any transcendent foundation default to a materialist view of the world. As human beings are the highest form of intelligence recognized in such a world, a culture without a transcendent basis has only itself to fall back on. In practical terms, this has led in the U.S. to a therapeutic culture in which the well-being of individuals is the highest criterion of right or wrong.

Autonomy is prized in a culture that sees self-fulfillment as the highest good, and autonomy for women necessarily must deal with their sexuality and fertility. In this culture, abortion is only the most visible part of a program that takes place largely out of sight, in the intimacy of personal relationships and decisions made by women and their partners. This program is aimed at instrumentalizing the uterus: to bring it entirely under the control of the owner, as a coffeemaker is entirely under the control of the person making the coffee. And this control is to be independent of a person’s sexual life, which is characterized by a right to pursue whatever desires one finds in one’s inner self, which is in turn the only authentic guide to autonomous freedom.

Sarah Lacy is a prime example of someone who has embraced this program. She is a business and technology journalist, as well as one of the relatively few women to found a Silicon Valley startup. In her 2017 book, she described how having two babies in the middle of it all actually made her a better entrepreneur (transforming her from a “cool dude patriarchy enabler” to a “badass feminist warrior,” in her words). Even the title of her book expresses an instrumental attitude toward the female anatomy: A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug.

Lacy’s main point is that women don’t have to give in to the patriarchal idea that being a good employee and a good mother at the same time is essentially impossible. She uses her own experiences in the shark-tank maledominated environment of Silicon Valley to show how being pregnant and having children revealed new capabilities she didn’t know she had. She became pregnant deliberately, and as a founder of a venture-capital-funded company, she had the resources for a nanny and other help when needed. So Lacy is not exactly an Everywoman whom middleand lower-class mothers can easily relate to.

But she wrote her book in the hopes that every woman can help to overthrow the patriarchy, which she defines as that pattern of attitudes, behaviors, and assumptions which “makes it impossible for women to be treated equally.” By “equally” she has in mind not only equality among women, but primarily the equality of women with men. Whatever freedoms men have in the sexual arena, women should have too, including the freedom to engage in sexual relations without fear of pregnancy, guaranteed by effective artificial contraception and backed up by abortion when contraception fails. Given the logic of this type of equality, this position makes sense. Something along this line of reasoning has persuaded millions of Americans to see prohibitions on abortion as simply and solely discrimination against women.

If one asks what Lacy’s most basic drives are—the things she would put forward as most important in her life—triumphing over increasingly daunting challenges would have to be high on her personal list. Righting perceived injustices also ranks highly, because she sees the entire patriarchy as an unjust imposition on all women, who should be encouraged to respond by actions like going on a nationwide one-day strike—as 90 percent of the women of Iceland did on Oct. 24, 1975. The resulting personal and economic disruptions in Iceland led to the passage of an equal-rights law for women in that country the following year, and Lacy cites Iceland as now being one of the most hospitable countries in the world for working women and single mothers.

Lacy is not wholly without moral principles. In her book, she calls out numerous ethical lapses on the part of journalists and organizations she was associated with. But underlying her system of ethics is the same basically materialist therapeutic culture that politicians such as Kamala Harris are a part of. If providing more accessible abortions is going to allow women to approach the ideal of personal autonomy, Harris is all for it, which may be one reason she made a Fight for Reproductive Freedoms tour in the spring of 2024 and spoke at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood clinic, lauding it “as an example of what true leadership looks like.” And as Trueman points out elsewhere in his book, sexual freedom has become inextricably bound with political freedom, in keeping with the title of a 1969 essay by feminist writer Carol Hanisch titled “The Personal Is Political.”

No culture is monolithic, and within the borders of the United States are many subcultures and cultural blends, some of which still acknowledge a transcendent source in the process of justifying their foundational beliefs. But the push for autonomy described above is a foundational aspect of popular culture, the culture that most young people absorb from social media, entertainment, and such institutions as they are obliged to deal with, primarily schools. Anyone, secular or religious, who hopes to change some aspects of that culture must start from where it is, not from where we wish it might be. And this approach can include searching for cultural trends or issues that can be turned in favorable directions.

A sign of one such trend is an opinion piece published in a Nashville newspaper and authored by Veronica Tadross, a freshman in public policy at Vanderbilt University. Her piece was headlined, “Why I, a feminist in college, believe birth control is anti-woman.” The Covid experience and the consequent erosion of trust in the medical establishment have led millions to take a second look at reassurances from doctors that were formerly accepted without question. One of these reassurances is that birth-control pills are “safe.”

Tadross points out that users of the pill risk an increased incidence of blood clots, migraines, and other adverse effects such as mood swings and weight gain. Besides the negative consequences for a woman’s own health, the pill creates an ideal environment in which men can abuse women. “When I got to college,” Tadross says, “my friends were undergoing birth control-induced hormone swings just to be mistreated by men it enabled them to get closer to.” She calls on men to accept responsibility for their sexual actions: “I refuse to go on birth control when doing so means assuming a potential risk that a man is not willing to take. Holding men accountable for consequences that are inherently their fault is the only way the feminist movement will succeed in the 21st century.”

Tadross speaks for many women of college age who find that relationships between the sexes have been reduced to alcohol-induced hookups in which women are put at a disadvantage, while men are free to pick and choose their pleasures without accepting any of the negative consequences. Despite all the decades of propaganda about sexual freedom, Tadross has seen through it to the extent that she finds women who divert their sexual organs from their intended purpose often end up being exploited by men.

She might be surprised to learn that Pope Paul VI predicted exactly this outcome if artificial contraception were to become widely accepted by society. In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, he wrote “. . . a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.” In other words, reducing the uterus to the status of an instrument leads to men using women as instruments as well.

As prescient as Paul VI has proved to be, Tadross writes apparently from an entirely secular point of view, and would probably concede no authority to a pope or other current religious figure. Nevertheless, on her own she has arrived at the same conclusion as the pope: Artificial birth control, at least in the form of the birth-control pill, is wrong. The reasoning by which she arrived at that conclusion is very different, but the conclusion is the same.

Often in history, Christians have made common cause with people of other faiths or of no faith on practical matters of importance. Charles Malik, a Lebanese diplomat and theologian, contributed significantly to the drafting of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, working comfortably with a Confucian and secular diplomats. When certain propositions compatible with Christianity can also be supported with reasoning from philosophy or natural law, Christians can often find common ground with other religions and secular groups with regard to practical legislation and similar public affairs.

Tadross uses two arguments to reach her conclusion that the pill is wrong for her to take. One is that the hormones in the pill are artificially manipulating her body into an unnatural and harmful state of sterility. Besides possibly causing a number of undesirable side effects, the pill violates a widely recognized principle in modern culture: the cult of the natural.

The late historian Jacques Barzun has pointed out that the appeal to nature in deciding moral issues is at least as old as the Enlightenment, and continues to be a prominent theme in matters as trivial as food marketing and packaging. In recent years, food manufacturers have discovered that the word “natural” on the label of almost any kind of product will produce a favorable response, either in terms of increased sales or a better opinion of the product on the part of the consumer. The entire climate-change movement is focused on restoring the earth’s atmosphere to its “natural” state before humanity started large-scale burning of fossil fuels. The drive toward natural ways of doing things as opposed to artificial or highly technologized processes and products favors the cause of moving sexually active people in the direction of dealing with their sexuality in the way God intended them to, rather than treating their genitals as biological entertainment centers and the uterus as a product feature.

The second argument Tadross uses to support her decision is the principle of equality between men and women. But she uses it in a way that is uncommon: Rather than asking for men to share with women rights that men already have, she asks for men to share the responsibilities that women inevitably carry as womb-bearing creatures. While in principle a man could fulfill his responsibility in this area by using a condom or a male birth-control pill (should one ever become commercially available), these are simply means to the deeper end of accepting responsibility for his participation in the sexual act. While it is hard to tell from her brief editorial what Tadross would like to see in a man, she would probably be pleased with one who saw her as more than an instrument for his own satisfaction, and more than simply a collaborator in sexual entertainment. She would probably be even more pleased with a man who saw her humanity as an integrated whole, with a history, a present, and a future that might or might not include children.

There are such men, but they are more commonly found in subcultures that recognize responsibility as the necessary flip side of freedom. Not all subcultures recognize transcendent foundations, but many acknowledge that freedom without responsibility is an illusion. For example, even military cultures in atheistic countries acknowledge that freedom from war requires preparing for war and the organization of armed forces who are ready to fight, even though freedom for individuals in the military is highly circumscribed. The medieval code of chivalry, which was always more fiction than reality, arose in a Christian context. But the code itself, with its idealization of womanhood and strict rules for the behavior of knights with respect to what was then regarded as the weaker sex, did not derive directly from traditional Christian teaching about relations between the sexes. The chivalric theme of courtly love greatly influenced the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, and its remnants persist today in the cinematic trope of “falling in love” and phrases such as “knight in shining armor” (shorthand for a man that a woman falls for not because he has compatible career goals or appeals to her intellectually, but because he sweeps her off her feet in a way that has much more to do with the heart than the head).

Chivalric romance is more likely to be the butt of jokes today than it is to be taken seriously, but its persistence in fiction and other cultural forms shows that a concept substantially independent of religious content has enough staying power to withstand the onset of modernity.

Although its name was not formulated by advertising executives wanting increased appeal among young people seeking natural solutions to their problems, natural family planning (NFP) is a family of techniques and practices that all begin by taking a woman’s biology as given, rather than as just raw material to be manipulated. By various means, NFP seeks to determine the timing of a woman’s freely running ovulatory cycle, and to establish what times of the month her fertility peaks and what times it is at a minimum. One of the most advanced methods of NFP, developed at Marquette University, uses a smartphone-size device to directly monitor female hormones, and allows the woman to pinpoint the time of ovulation with unprecedented accuracy compared to previous methods. Further advances in technology may lead to even simpler and cheaper methods of determining a woman’s cycle, with perhaps nothing more complicated than a smartphone app.

As a strictly observational process, NFP leaves a woman and her partner free to use the information it provides to either increase or decrease her chances of conception. Couples wishing to have a baby can time their efforts for the greatest chance of bearing fruit, while couples wishing to delay pregnancy can select other times.

Historically, NFP has been most popular among those, like Catholic couples, who generally favor large families, but its use is not restricted just to them. Compared to artificial contraceptive devices and drugs, NFP requires more effort: regular systematic checking of biological signs on the part of the woman and a willingness to forego intercourse at certain times on the part of both partners. Complying with such a program is harder than having the woman take a pill each day, or receive an injection a few times a year, with the man taking no precautions at all.

But if young women such as Veronica Tadross could easily gain knowledge of their fertile and infertile periods and live in a culture in which men respected their wishes in this area, it seems like NFP would be the pinnacle of all contraceptive methods, even when viewed from a secular perspective. I see no reason why even Christians who homeschool would object to their daughters learning through NFP technology about the details of their developing bodies and exactly what is going on during ovulation. Just as ultrasound technology changed the meaning of pregnancy by showing women their babies before birth, in the proper context showing young women the actual onset of their fertility could have a profoundly positive effect on their attitudes toward sexuality. Even a thoroughgoing modernist such as Sarah Lacy might have more respect for a man responsible enough to take “no” for an answer when “yes” might mean an unwanted baby.

Imagine a culture of such women who are highly aware of the state of their own bodies and invite sexual attention only when they decide on their own terms that they want it. How would men fare in such an environment?

The downsides to men are obvious: replacing sex on demand with the dictates of some arbitrary clock the woman makes the man aware of. Another downside is the genuine danger of pregnancy, avoidable only by diligent attention to the state of the woman’s body or (in case that measure fails) backed up by the more drastic measure of abortion. Dealing with a woman who might bear a child as a result of lovemaking would become a more serious matter for all but the most insensitive of men. Widespread availability of artificial contraception has led to an increase, not a decrease, in abortions. If we run Pope Paul VI’s argument backwards, supposing artificial contraception becomes less popular than NFP, we might well see a long-term decline in the number of abortions once the culture adjusted to the new status quo.

Tadross sees, however dimly, that the key to regaining the respect that women want from men is to make women worthy of respect, consideration, and even fear. Fear is not always a negative thing. As an electrical engineer dealing from time to time with high-voltage gear, I have harbored a healthy fear of getting electrocuted. The thoughtfulness and observance of precautions this fear inspired in me has allowed my career to continue through five decades, rather than being cut short by an unfortunate laboratory accident.

In the crass sexual marketplace that relations between unmarried men and women have become today, men who are not hunks lose out and often become resentful and bitter “incels” whose involuntary celibacy is a predictable side effect of the free market in sex created by artificial contraception.

But if large numbers of women became persuaded that NFP (which would probably have to be rebranded as something like “natural birth control” to widen its appeal) was the best way to treat their own bodies, then the unfortunate incels whose physical appearance puts them at a disadvantage would suddenly be handed an option: Cooperate with the woman’s preferences, be sensitive to her needs, and make it plain that you have her best interests at heart.

Nothing I say here will prevent some people from interpreting this proposal as simply a call to embrace promiscuity rather than to proclaim abstinence. As a Christian, I recognize that adultery, fornication, and all other sexual activity outside of marriage are violations of the spirit or the letter of the Sixth Commandment (Seventh for those in the Reformed tradition)—the one about adultery. But like all the other commandments, this one gets broken a lot, by both the relatively few people who know about it and the majority of people who have possibly heard of the Ten Commandments but would be hard pressed to name one.

Recall that we are searching in the ruins of a post-Christian culture for trends and tropes we can encourage, because their tendency is to bring people’s lives closer to conformance with Christ without yet introducing them to Him. Such a policy may soon be forced on Christians, as the culture’s view of Christianity becomes more negative every year, associating it mainly with prejudice, bigotry, and authoritarian personalities and regimes. We are not yet accustomed to working underground, either metaphorically or literally, but our distant forefathers were. The place was called the catacombs, and it wasn’t fun, but it was a means of survival.

Sexual morality and the type of fidelity that would lead to both fewer abortions and less use of contraception in general are only two aspects of a way of life that every Christian is called to follow, a way that was encapsulated by an adamantine phrase in an essay by Charles Gore, an Anglican divine who served as Bishop of Oxford during World War I and died in 1932. Two years before his death, Gore published a pamphlet opposing the Anglican Lambeth Conference’s 1930 decision to allow the use of artificial contraception for married couples. As described in a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, the conference was the first official Christian body to break with the longstanding tradition upheld by Christian churches since the earliest days of the movement: that artificial contraception was a grave sin, inside or outside of marriage.

Gore’s pamphlet, which Touchstone reprinted in full, is a fascinating window into the state of the question at the time as it appeared to a priest with upwards of six decades of experience in the ministry. Gore claimed that, in allowing artificial contraception for some married couples, the Church of England was thereby creating two classes of Christians: a higher class who could resist the temptation of contraceptive use, and a lower class who could not. He compared this state of affairs with the way some churches set apart special practices of asceticism for some clergy while not expecting them from the laity. All such distinctions were wrong, he said. Every Christian is called to the same ideal, which is to live like Christ. We shall all fail in the attempt, but we should all have the same goal to strive for. As he put it, “All alike must die to live: before all alike lies an unlimited liability—to suffering loss, to the effort of extreme mortification, even to death itself ‘for the Name.’”

“Unlimited liability” is what each Christian accepts when he enlists to follow Christ. The modern age is familiar only with limited liability: no-contract gyms, free apps, government entitlements with no strings attached, and men who say to women, “I’ll have sex with you, but I won’t accept responsibility for any consequences, such as your pregnancy.”

A world in which women take full responsibility for what their own bodies are doing and refuse any artificial means of manipulating them simply for the convenience of men would be a world of unlimited liability concerning the sexual act. While the law can be a teacher, experience is a better one. And both men and women would be wiser in such a world—a world that would be more natural than the artificial-contraception one we have today.

________________________________________________

Original Bio:

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of engineering at Texas State University and has published articles on engineering ethics, the history of technology, and atmospheric physics.