Daily Archive

Christianity and its various sects harm women.

    In the early 1960’s, in response to the call of many millions of Catholic women, especially in the US, who wanted to limit the size of their families through the use of contraception, a papal commission was set up to look at Catholic teaching on birth control in light of the current scientific knowledge.   If found that there was no scriptural, theological, philosophical reason, or basis in natural law for the Church’s prohibition on birth control.

[…]

   However, in 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encyclical Humanae Vitae.  The encyclical reaffirmed the Church’s rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God’s law.  Ten years later, Pope John Paul declared that Humanae Vitae was ‘a matter of fundamental Catholic belief’. 

    In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban.  For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue.  Unfortunately for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is.  There, the right to choose weather or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman’s prospectsfor freeing herself and her family from poverty.  It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women.  Pope John Paul II spent a considerable port of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells poor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ’s sacrifice on the cross ‘in vain’.  He said:’No personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.

   Underlying this attitude is the assumption that when it comes to having a baby, a woman’s consent is not necessary and that once made pregnant, accidentally or not, her own will is rendered irrelevant.  The moral implications of this are interesting when compared with those governing our attitudes to rape.  All civilized societies accept that a woman’s consent is necessary in order to have intercourse with her.  Not to seek that consent and to coerce her into intercourse is to commit rape, which is a serious crime.  But yet according to the Church, in the vital matter of pregnancy, a woman’s consent is beside the point. 

   She can be made pregnant against her wishes, and without her consent.  The inexorable law of God overrides her will and the fact that she is pregnant determines her fate.  Her personal autonomy is denied to her.

   To deny the need for her consent in this the most important aspect of a woman’s life is surely the moral equivalent of justifying rape.  It reminds us once more of the profound contempt that has underpinned Catholic attitudes towards women and that has been responsible for so much suffering down through the centuries. 

–                                                                                                                 Jack Holland.  A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. p. 241 – 243

Religion, centuries of practice keeping women in their place…