The morning-after pill is a godsend – in my Catholic opinion
he morning-after pill: licence for promiscuity or a godsend in a crisis? Discuss. No biting, eyegouging or hair-pulling.
This week it emerged that women can now buy advance supplies of Levonelle emergency contraception for £4.99, a fraction of the cost at high-street outlets such as Superdrug, where prices start at £13.50 a pop.
The incendiary element is that customers can buy two packs at a time, which has led to the usual polarised response of elation and outrage, cries of immorality and counter cries of oppression.
Now, I am an Irish Catholic. A practising Catholic – and still practising after all these years, because I’m not sure I’ll ever be good enough, which is, of course, central in Catholicism. So, theologically speaking, I am inclined to keep my head under the parapet. But as the mother of girls, I just can’t stop myself from adding my tuppenceworth to the debate, which isn’t really a debate, more of a pointless shouting match.
Fellow Catholic Jacob Rees-mogg, of course, would fastidiously keep to the catechism. This makes his life at once easier and more difficult. Steadfast belief is uncomplicated, because there’s no room for messy equivocation; and complicated, because to equivocate, messily, is human.
When Rees-mogg recently opined that he was against abortion in all circumstances, including after rape and incest, he was met with absolute horror and vituperation by precisely the same sort of people who would zealously defend other faiths for their belief systems, however rigid and inflexible.
I think he’s wrong on this one. I believe abortion is a terrible thing, but sometimes a necessary terrible thing; there’s a deal of difference between hating the sin, not the sinner.
Does that make me a worse Catholic? Absolutely. A worse human being? Moot point.
But the MP for North East Somerset is perfectly entitled to hold those views. The biggest shock is that anyone is shocked. His stance is entirely predictable if you know anything about Catholicism, or have clapped eyes on him, with his singular dress sense and six peculiarly named children.
Our embrace of multiculturalism has led, I fear, to a creeping and shameful intolerance for Christianity. Whatever happened to our democratic consensus that we might disapprove of what someone says but will, nonetheless, defend to the death their right to say it? It’s a stirring quotation generally ascribed to Voltaire, but was, in fact, coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, his biographer. Another woman consigned to the shadows. But I digress. Admittedly, the Christian cause is not helped by people like Nigel and Sally Rowe, capital-letter Christians who have withdrawn their child from a Church of England school because of its transgender policy.
The couple have decided to homeeducate their six-year-old son and his eight-year-old sibling after a boy in the class was permitted to wear a dress, asserting that it felt “wrong”.
I’m not sure Jesus would have agreed, but, to be honest, even if he had harboured doctrinal misgivings about a boy in a frock, he was the sort of liberal who would have probably been excommunicated with a load of papal bull dumped on his head. And he almost certainly would not have sued the school, as the Rowes plan to do, which makes me wonder whether their motives aren’t political, rather than parental. Conceivably, they are both.
Which brings us right back to the morning-after pill. Catholicism’s purblind insistence that sex is not a recreational activity, but a procreational one, flies in the face of human experience and is wildly out of kilter with modern mores.
At grass roots level, priests don’t turn a hair at unmarried couples. In developing countries, they quietly understand the need for contraception below the ecclesiastical radar.
But rules is rules, and without doctrine to scaffold the church’s core beliefs, it would crumble away to nothing. (Now you see why I’m only a practising Catholic…)
Moreover, it’s not the only world religion to take a dim view of sex before marriage; Islam and Judaism aren’t exponents of the pleasure principle either. Their teachings on abortion appear – I fully concede to speak as an outsider – to be broadly similar, too.
So where does the morning-after pill fit in? I have written in these pages that having undergone IVF and seen my daughters through a microscope as tiny clusters of cells, I am of the opinion that life begins when a sperm and egg fuse.
It is hypocritical of me, then, to endorse the morning-after pill? Yes. Entirely. I hold my hands up. But on a sliding scale, it is preferable to an unwanted pregnancy, the termination of an embryo, an abortion of a foetus.
Accidents happen. Events can be unforeseen. No contraception is 100 per cent effective – although tell that to a gaggle of 16-year-olds and they will be aghast. When a mother friend of mine pointed this out to her daughter and her mates, they were first indignant and then cross.
“I bet if men got pregnant, there would be a 100 per cent effective contraceptive by now,” muttered one. She’s right of course. But what can you do? Apart, that is, from taking precautions before and, if necessary, after. Although before is always wiser.
When teenage pregnancies happen, it is our daughters who carry the can. Our sons will, of course, be affected, but it is the girl whose life is thrown into complete chaos.
Despite what the naysayers claim, greater accessibility of the morningafter pill will not actively encourage casual sex among adults because nobody needs encouragement.
Happily, teenage pregnancies are dropping due to social media – girls and boys are too busy sexting for actual sex, plus the risk of “slutshaming” on social media, however cruel, is a powerful social constraint.
If there’s emergency medication that could make all the difference for our daughters, then we should welcome it – but first educate them on how and when to use it.