Celebrating Societal Contempt of Children

The contraceptive device (IUD) stands as a monument to what our culture cherishes.

A giant inflatable IUD, standing at 20 feet tall, has been popping up in American cities, from Washington D.C. to Tampa. It heralds the plastic intrauterine device that is placed in a woman’s uterus to serve as a long-term contraceptive (It also works as an abortifacient). The activist group, Americans for Contraception, is distributing it. They have been frustrated by the refusal of the U.S. Senate to pass the Right to Contraception Act.

Even on the surface, a giant monument to contraception ought to disturb us, for that’s ultimately a symbol of our contempt for children. It treats children more as an accessory than as people, and certainly as something to be avoided, unless and until one actually desires a child—thereby reducing the child to a personal project rather than as a gift from God. This celebration of contraception further represents our collective desire to have dominion over our own nature, which always results in dominion over the more vulnerable (such as the unborn). Control over nature quickly becomes dominion by one group of men over another.

Such monuments, which are rarely met with widespread derision because of the state of our non-culture, are symbols of a rejection of life as a gift to be received with gratitude. This is the case both within the family unit, where it is seen most intimately, and in the wider culture, wherein birthrates are lower than replacement levels. We could (and do) import people from areas of the world that don’t idolize contraception, to make up for the birth dearth, but that results in the loss of a People—whether defined according to the traditional understanding of ethnicity or the more contemporary of culture-based peoples. Replacement migration could only be a net good if we sought our own destruction and the marginalization of our values.

A story in The Tampa Bay Times proclaimed that women had hugged the giant inflatable monstrosity, and it seems reasonable to assume that they did so without evaluating what such devices do to women. After all, their entire intent is to separate the sexual act from the procreative nature of the act. In other words, it is to reduce women to sex objects who can be used without consequence and to ensure that no long-term commitment to her need be made, despite the sexual union. It is thus inherently commodifying—reducing her to an object that can be used and then discarded.

A woman who was in favor of this ethos would be embracing something self-erasing by seeking to deny a fundamental (and beautiful) part of herself and her womanhood. Such enthusiastic support of making women into objects seems parallel to how the pornography industry treats women—and indeed, that’s an industry that could not exist without the dual life-denying options of contraception and abortion. The pornography industry uses both mediums to separate a woman’s sexual potential from her fertility so that she may be used as a device that will prey on other people’s vices, that they can be deprived of funds.

This brings us to the supposed ‘right’ to contraception, where we encounter an obvious inability of some to understand what a right is, along with the relationship between one’s rights and his duties. Simply declaring something a right does not make it so. I have a right to life, and thus the right to be able to obtain the means necessary to defend it, so that I can perform my duty to work to merit my last end. Our rights are God-given, are morally inviolable, and exist that we might perform our rightful duties to reach our last end. This is part of natural law, which can be discerned through the exercise of reason.

There can be no right to deny the sexual act of the complementarity inherent to it, of the offering intrinsic to it, nor to kill any offspring that might result from it. She has a right to her own autonomy, but pregnancy will always be a potential consequence of that, and in fact, is what the act is ordered towards. It’s not a defect of a woman’s sexuality—it’s the entire point.

The traveling inflatable is being referred to by supporters as the “statue of reproductive liberty,” which is deceptive phrasing, for it’s clearly about reproductive bondage—preventing reproductive potential—and social bondage by making women more likely to be exploited. Further, contraceptive drugs for women are easily the most dangerous elective drugs that are available.

Those who complain the loudest about the sexualization of women in our culture are also those who promote such things as widespread contraception, which does exactly that. Those who proclaim that they want to promote and encourage women cannot simultaneously deny the very things that make up a woman. As long as we are reducing people to objects of convenience, and then celebrating that like a cultural accomplishment, we’re on the road to a destruction that we will deserve.