Contraception, Abortion and the Culture of Death

Here is a story from the Daily Telegraph that documents the growing culture of death in the UK. Abortion is increasingly being used as a form of birth control.

Government data have disclosed that 89 girls aged 17 or under who terminated a pregnancy last year had had at least two abortions previously.

The head of Britain’s largest abortion provider said many young women were living chaotic lives that meant they could not organise contraception. . . .

Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said repeated pregnancies among teenage girls were often caused by chaotic lifestyles and difficulties they had in using contraception.

This is an interesting revelation. I always thought that pregnancy was caused by having sexual intercourse. It really is good to have this cleared up (!) The story notes:

Almost 18,000 abortions were carried out on girls aged under 18, including more than 1,000 on girls aged 14 or under. The statistics follow controversy last month about Britain’s first television advertisement for abortion services.

Radical feminists have defended this practice and are intent on continuing to defend it until new chemical abortion drugs have come onto the market. The Washington Post reports on a new "contraceptive" that works up to five days after intercourse. But, of course, it is probably, at least in come cases destroying a fertilized embryo.

A French drug company is seeking to offer American women something their European counterparts already have: a pill that works long after "the morning after."

The drug, dubbed ella, would be sold as a contraceptive -- one that could prevent pregnancy for as many as five days after unprotected sex. But the new drug is a close chemical relative of the abortion pill RU-486, raising the possibility that it could also induce abortion by making the womb inhospitable for an embryo.

The controversy sparked by that ambiguity promises to overshadow the work of a federal panel that will convene next week to consider endorsing the drug. The last time the Food and Drug Administration vetted an emergency contraceptive -- Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill -- the decision was mired in debate over such fundamental questions as when life begins and the distinction between preventing and terminating a pregnancy.

The line between contraception and abortion is becoming increasingly blurred. Surgical abortion on a mass scale is a modern invention; chemical abortion (along with infanticide) has been the norm throughout fallen human history. We may soon get to the point where surgical abortion is relatively rare while chemical abortion is as common as contraception is today.

Having spent most of my life blithely assuming that one could easily draw a line between abortion (evil) and contraception (neutral), I now find it more and more difficult to regard contraception with anything less than horror and loathing. It seems more and more clear to me that contraception is a foundational building block of the culture of death.

One of the signs of our fallenness as human beings is that we so easily desire to have sex with people we don't want to have children with. This was seen by the Church Fathers - following Scripture - as lust. Today it is seen as a natural and good thing. We can't have it both ways. This is one of those points where we have to decide if Christianity is true or not. When we reach the point as a culture where we are willing to offer our children as sacrifices to the idol of sensual pleasure - when we are literally willing to kill for sex - then we know that we have sunk to the level of the nations in the land of Canaan that God told the Israelites to exterminate.

Thinking of contraception as morally "neutral" in this situation seems to be a case of planting one's head in the sand and refusing to face the moral reality around us.