After (ashamedly, I might add) allowing my subscription to Touchstone Magazine lapse for an issue, I received my first new issue this morning from the postman.
Already it has showed itself again to be a resource well worth reading and wrestling with. Anthony Esolen, on behalf of the editorial staff at Touchstone, wrote a scathing editorial on the reception of President Obama to Notre Dame entitled, “Notre Madame et le President: There Was No Moral Common Ground“. In it he purposes to reveal the impossibility of common ground in the abortion debate when one side denies the “God-given nature of the human beings in question”. I found his comments on contraception especially powerful, both for the entire abortion context and particularly for those Pro-Lifers who see no problems with it:
“Except in the case of rape, there are no “unintended pregnancies,” none. There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence.
Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that they are doing what makes babies, since otherwise they would not go so far out of their way (donning or inserting into the body uncomfortable devices, or flooding the system with pregnancy-mimicking hormones) to thwart the body’s natural functions. The “problem” in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds…” – [emphasis mine] page 3, July/August 2009, Touchstone Magazine, Anthony Esolen.
Could it be that many evangelicals are so susceptible to “moral aphasia” in the abortion debate because we hold so dearly (albeit, theologically and philosophically inconsistently) to our own contraceptive ethic? Are we more willing to commit to “reducing the number of unintended pregnancies” because we ourselves believe there really is such a thing as an “unintended pregnancy” to begin with?
May this be a call to discern the spirit of the age, and respond with a biblical doctrine of marriage, sex, and family.
‘BH
