Flipping the Script

Before diving into Humanae vitae with my students, I had them do a "four corners" activity. I put together a list of a handful of statements and ask them to take a stand - strongly disagree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. They have to choose a stance (or neutral/no opinion), write out a short explanation, and then stand in their corner of the room ready to talk when we have our discussion. Thus we started our unit of marriage, sexuality, and birth control.

As we discuss these issues, my goal is to elicit an explanation from them and challenge their principles. Even if they disagree with me and my understanding of morality, I want them to identify their reasoning so I can push them to articulate what underrides their opinions to make them more than shallow stances.

Toward the end, after talking about childless couples and simultaneously procreative and unitive sex, my students had to react to the statement, "Couples in exclusive, committed relationships should be allowed to use birth control." Naturally, I'm trying to see where their line is for birth control - some think it's for everyone, for just committed couples, for marriage alone, or not to be used at all. Ultimately, I'm hoping to make a coherent case for not using birth control, even if many students' instinct is to resist.

So as we unpacked the usual process of the birth control debate, I had a thought to reframe the issue. I love to put new parameters onto these discussions, to keep the focus on the crux of the issue that drives the discussion but to be refresh the context. It's a beautiful combination of professional BS'ing and providential Holy Spirit inspiration to draw on knowledge, wisdom, and much more and to have a moment like this in the midst of a classroom discussion. And keeping with the God who has a sense of humor, sometimes it falls completely flat.

In this case, I admitted to them that my next question might not work or make sense, but that I'd try it anyway and see. I asked my students, "What if we had technology that withheld the unitive part of sex - so no emotional, physical intimacy, no feeling the closeness of sex, no pleasure from the act - but maintained the procreative part of sex - so the act still resulted in conception and pregnancy?"

My "strongly agree and agree" students took a moment to react, taken aback a bit by the strangeness of the idea. They processed their reaction into words and rightly identified it as being wrong, backwards, even boring. They were uninterested in such a thing, viewing it as missing something. I followed up by saying that this is the reaction that I have to birth control.

Birth control eliminates an integral part of sex through the means of artificial, human-made, human-chosen actions. People who advocate for its use emphasize the pleasure and freedom while devaluing the procreative element of sex. The true value of sex, the fullness of our sexuality, is in upholding these parts together.

These students didn't want birth control to sustain procreation but eliminate union. Why then is it so much more ok to restrict procreation but retain union?