The Two Lists: Why Abortion is So Common Today

Here is a personal testimony from a convert from atheism to Christianity about the damage done to women by the contraceptive mentality. Jennifer Fulwiler, who operates a blog called Conversion Diary, posted this at Inside Catholic. Here is the most interesting part of her post. The last sentence I quote, in particular, is quietly powerful.

"My staunch support of these views did not soften until a few years ago, when a religious conversion after a life of atheism led me to the Catholic Church. I began researching the ancient Judeo-Christian understanding of human sexuality, in which the sexual act is seen as being inextricably entwined with its potential for creating new human life. The more I considered this point of view, the more I questioned my long-held views. In fact, I started to see the catastrophic mistake our society had made when we started believing that the life-giving potential of the sexual act could be safely forgotten about as long as people use contraception.

The gravity of this error became clear to me when I came across research that Time magazine published in 2007, citing data from the Guttmacher Institute that showed the most common reasons women have abortions. It immediately struck me that none of the factors on the list -- not feeling capable of parenting, not being able to afford a baby, not being in a relationship stable enough to raise a child -- were conditions that we encourage women to consider before engaging in sexual activity.

It was then that I could finally articulate the source of the anger I'd felt all these years. In every society, there are two critical lists: acceptable conditions for having a baby, and acceptable conditions for having sex. From time immemorial, the one thing that almost every society had in common is that their two lists matched up. It was only with the widespread acceptance of contraception in the middle of the 20th century, creating an upheaval in the public psyche in which sex and babies no longer went hand-in-hand, that the two lists began to diverge. And now, in 21st-century America, they look something like this:

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have sex:

• If you're in a stable relationship
• If you feel emotionally ready
• If you're free of sexually transmitted diseases
• If you have access to contraception

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have a baby:

• If you can afford it
• If you've finished your education
• If you feel emotionally ready to parent a child
• If your partner would make a good parent
• If you're ready for all the lifestyle changes that would be involved with parenthood

As long as those two lists do not match, we will live in a culture where abortion is common and where women are at war with their own bodies. Considering the disparity between the two lists made me begin to see the level of damage that contraception and the mentality it produces have done to women as individuals and as a group."

Just think of the following statistics, (which are quoted in the article). According to the Guttmacher Institute (which is hardly a pro-life institution), 70% of women who use a method of contraception with a 99% effectiveness rate for 10 years will have an unwanted pregnancy. And half of all women getting abortions were using contraception. You can see why abortion is absolutely necessary once society embraces the contraceptive mentality and separates sex from procreation. Without it, the lifestyle of casual sex outside of marriage would be unthinkable for most people.