THE CATHOLIC VIEWPOINT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 307, 28 December 1934, Page 13

THE CATHOLIC VIEWPOINT.

Isobel Haresnape, as an individual, may quite honestly be actuated by what she considers to be most worthy motives. But she obviously fails to realise that what she is advocating is moral anarchy. For the sanction of birth control is based 011 the tacit admission that in this matter carnal impulse is the final and unchallengeable law. Contraception affirms the theory that we may lawfully measure the scope of our ideals and principles to lit the claims of our physical pleasure or our social convenience. The moral law is (lung 011 the scrap-heap as having outlived its validity and usefulness. And when, as in her previous letter, Isobel Haresnape associates 'human brotherhood in Christ" with the practice of contraception she is dragging her Christian ideals into pretty queer company. For that ardent champion of birth control. Dr. Marie Stopes. makes no bones about the matter. 111 an address delivered in the Criterion Theatre. London, in 1925, she is reported 11s saying: ''The asceticism of the Bible is against lis, not only the Old Testament, but many of the passages in the epistles of the New. ( Augustine is against us, Paul is against us. As a Christian nation we are soaked in their ideas. So arc our doctors, and that is why so many of them disagree with us. The asceticism of organised Christianity is against us. I am out to smash organised Christianity 011 this subject." And to judge from the expressed opinions of the more active contraeeptionists that seems to be a common attitude. It is useful I hat Isobel Haresnape so frankly discounts the effectiveness and value of self-control. It clears the air considerably. But in the effort to depreciate self-control as a factor she is led to make the extraordinary suggestion that voluntary abstention from sexual intercourse may not be quite moral. Surely she cannot be serious! Your correspondent "R.S." describes my remarks as "pious irrationalism." The question is not one of "piety," it is one of morality. There are certain actions, of which positive contraception is one, which are intrinsically evil. Being inherently evil, th.cy are wrong independently of human judgments, and independently even of the Church. The Church does not make these actions evil and wrong; she only declares their malice. No'individual, 110 group of individuals, not even the Church of God, can make such actions ,good and right. Morality is founded 011 the essential and God-given nature of things. Contraception is a violation of that nature of things. It is corrupt in that it is a perversion of "the right use of the procreative faculties, and, being so, it is an evil independently of "piety" or of religion; it is a violation of the natural la}v. "Contraception," says "R.S.", "admittedly is often indefensible to prevent offspring on the part of those in a position to rear them." Is it? Then why is it? I would specially like "R.S." to tell us the grounds on which he would justify his statement that "contraception is often indefpnsible." The whole tenor of the two letters with which I am dealing herein shows the utter confusion of the thought with which birth control advocates seek to justify their viewpoint. Listen to this one: "The question is simply contraception or cannon fodder." Now what earthly common sense is there in that statement? And w litre does it lead? If that remark is taken in its literal sense, why should any more children at all be born ? And, in the same breath "R.S." declares that "contraception admittedly is often indefensible." Into what sort of tangle has he got himself? "R.S." asks whether I am "so theoretical a moralist" as to suggest that, for a relief worker with several young children to feed, "birth control as an economic necessity is an affront to human intelligence." I would ask "R.S." this: Is he so practical an economst that the only specific he can propose for ensuring the feeding of hungry children is to practise contraception? How is the makeshift of birth control going to dispose of the problem of unemployment and poverty, whose solution is deep-rooted in the moral fundamentals of economics? Is society to • admit that amidst its wealth of productiveness it is incompetent to provide for its citizens? Is it do fearful that its children may be destroyed in future wars that it must anticipate bomb and poison gas by frustrating birth or even by destroying the unborn child-life? Are we all so bankrupt of intelligence, justice and wisdom, of practical horsesense, that we must surrender to poverty and hunger as being problems we cannot solve and front which we cannot escape? Apparently Isobel Haresnape and "R.S." think so. 1 And so, because wc lack the vision and courage to banish poverty from a world of teeming plenty, God's creative act must be frustrated or the probable nascent eliildlifc must be destroyed; under the guise of birth control, society must resort to practices wjiose unnatnralness and foulness arc of the vintage of Sodom and Gomorrah; and a wife must be degraded to a status of "utility" that is an obscene insult to her womanhood. And that, presumably, is social "progress" and "advanced" economics! J. C. GILL.