The Body Is Not a Mere Tool for the Expression of Feelings: How to Counter Dualism

Hanna Klaus
Medical Mission Sister, obstetrician/gynecologist,
executive director of the Natural Family Planning Center
of Washington, D. C.
Reproduced with Permission

Most of the young couples I meet during Natural Family Planning instructions have never heard of dualism but at some level they are open to rejecting it. One of the classic forms of dualism was Manicheanism, according to which there are two powers - good and evil, or God and Satan - but they were equally balanced. Other forms contrasted the mind with the body. (See for instance http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/.) Today's dualists say that the human body is subpersonal, part of the world that the "person" is called to dominate, that one can manipulate or use one's body to express any desires. While the culture treats fertility as if it were a disease to be isolated or removed chemically or mechanically from the body, those who seek natural methods of family planning obviously are open to learning to understand the couple's cyclic fertility in order to make informed choices about when to attempt conception. Given that their choice flies in the face of the dominant culture's practices, it is instructive to review how we arrived at this position.

Until the Church of England's Lambeth conference in 1930 no religious body made serious efforts to separate sex from procreation, but Lambeth approved the use of then-available contraceptives for married couples. Pope Pius XI soon published Casti connubii which re-stated the constant teaching which prohibited interference in the conjugal act to make it intentionally infertile, but appeared to subordinate the love-enhancing role of the conjugal act to the procreation of children. Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes spoke to the two ends of marriage, but John XXIII found it necessary to appoint a commission which reported to his successor. Paul VI. Thirty-eight years after Lambeth Pope Paul VI had to issue the encyclical Humanae Vitae to remind his flock that the use of contraceptives was still wrong.

When Humanae Vitae was issued, the only known natural methods for the regulation of births were calendar and temperature rhythm. I had not learned much about either except that they were reputed to be ineffective. My first reaction was to think, "It's good to know what we can't do, Holy Father, but what can we do?" The question was intensified by a patient, a female student at our medical school who wanted to have sex with her fiance but did not like the pill because it wiped out her affect, and neither of them liked barriers. As she was telling me all this, she suddenly exploded and said, "Why do I have to change myself around to have sex, why can't I be me?" Parenthetically, neither she nor her fiance were Catholic. I had no advice to offer other than waiting for marriage if she did not want to conceive before she graduated. Providentially, the first American publication of Dr. Billings's book came across my desk soon after, and a charismatic couple and I prayed and cursed our way through it. But it proved that the Billings method was solidly grounded.

At the meeting of Billings Ovulation method teachers in Melbourne, Australia in 1978,John Finnis, professor of philosophy and ethics at Oxford, presented the intellectual history of what had become formal dissent to Paul VI's encyclical. Among others, Professor Louis Janssens of Louvain had begun by advocating the use of the birth control pill during breast feeding because nature sometimes allowed ovulation during this time. Never mind that this drug passes through the milk into the baby and can cause severe damage - theologians are not expected to know these things. Janssens's colleagues then prodded: if there was no theological contraindication to temporarily sterilizing a woman, what was the objection to permanently sterilizing her? He had to acquiesce. But since no method was beyond failure - after all, one does not add anything to the sexual act to make it procreative - why not allow fail-safe abortion as a backup? By this time Janssens realized he had crossed a line and responded that the problem was physicalism; "We have to assume the biological into the human." As I, a simple obstetrician listened to all of this, it dawned on me that we don't have to assume the biological into the human. It is already there, and has assumed great dignity because of the Incarnation.

When the debate about abortion heated up in the early 1970s, I began to talk to groups about embryonic and fetal development. I don't think I affected many abortion decisions. Later, realizing that conventional contraception had done nothing to reduce the abortion rate, I began to teach the Billings Ovulation Method of natural family planning, thinking that the natural method would be more acceptable than the fertility-suppressing contraceptives. In those days most of the advocates of NFP spent much time talking about the side effects of hormonal contraception, while few other than I spoke about the fact that barriers - whether physical or chemical - seriously diminish the marital relationship by attempting to remove half of its meaning. In the process contraception reduces the partners to being means to an end, rather than being nonsubstitutable individuals joined in a covenant relationship.

Some of the women who came for instructions had a history of abortion. The majority of abortion-seekers in the 1970s were teens and young women. It dawned on me that the only way to stop abortion was to prevent the crisis pregnancy.How to do that? My high risk group of pregnant teens at St. Louis University Hospital was made up of girls 13 to 15 years of age. I handled their prenatal care, delivered their babies, and followed them after delivery. All had known about contraceptives and where to get them; none had used them. Why not? They were not articulate, but the gist was that they did not want to use them. Something about contraception repelled them.

Thinking about where these girls were developmentally began to shed some light. At puberty each person has a number of personal developmental tasks. Perhaps the most important among them is ego identity, of which gender identity is an essential component. When a girl begins to menstruate, she knows at some level that she is not only becoming a woman, but also that she is biologically capable of becoming a mother. She needs to integrate this understanding into her self-understanding in order to grow toward maturity. She is also at the stage of the personal fable which Erickson has described as thinking of oneself as being on center stage all the time. In that situation, there are no grays, only blacks and whites. If then the doctor, the "god in white," tells the girl that she needs to take a contraceptive to remove her fertility from her body, what might she "hear"? If she needs medicine against her fertility, her fertility is some form of sickness. But she considers it an important part of herself. So she either does not take her pill, or takes it irregularly, and conceives. Parenthetically, the current campaign to reintroduce the IUD is designed to override the daily choice needed to take pills correctly, suggesting that women still resist removing part of themselves from an act meant to signify complete, mutual self-giving and complete, mutual acceptance.

At any rate, I thought that if! could teach my girls how to recognize and accept their fertility rather than suppress it, they might behave differently.At the very least, they might refrain from intercourse during the time of recognized fertility. That was the beginning of Teen STAR® (Sexuality Teaching in the context of Adult Responsibility). Instead of limiting their sexual relations to the time of infertility, they abstained, period. Most virgins maintained their virginity, and half the sexually active girls stopped having sex.The program has been extended to males, and, interestingly, their behavior is similar to the females'. Once young people begin to understand and value their bodies, they no longer view them as mere tools for implementing the whim of the moment, but see their bodies as the physical expression of their person. Then they behave in ways that tell us that they value themselves by making deliberate behavioral choices rather than behave impulsively. That's very countercultural, but after mastering Teen STAR® students in many cultures tell us that they have more self-confidence, make their own decisions, and easily resist pressures to engage in behaviors which they consider inappropriate.

Our culture considers the body as a tool of the person to carry out any desire. And if our own body can't provide the necessary means, any other one will do. If a woman wants to start a family when her own ova are no longer fertilizable, donor eggs are sought. Genetic continuity is dismissed as unimportant by those who promote this practice. Yet, when insemination with donor sperm is proposed to an infertile couple, the husband who accepts does so most reluctantly. Studies have shown that children conceived by such heterologous sperm donation generally do not receive the same paternal guidance as children born from their biological parents. Moreover, consider that children often want to know their biological parents and take steps to learn their identity. Even previously closed adoption files may now be opened in several states when the child reaches majority. It's all part of needing to know who we are, and part of that includes our ancestry.

Thankfully, for those who believe, the identity of the ultimate Father of us all is known. But to come to know him we needed him to come in a form where we could not only hear, but also touch him. So he became man, and taught us that we are all made in his image. Seen in this light both the dignity of the human person and the boundaries of attempts at change become clear. Our bodies are not simply tools for the expression of feelings or for the implementation of desires.We are our bodies. Blessed John Paul II referred to our body as the "quasi sacrament of the person" (Laborem Exercens) and our bodies and souls have equal value in God's eyes. St.Thomas Aquinas teaches that we will not reach our full perfection until we are reunited with our resurrected bodies in Heaven. How that will be accomplished, no one knows, but as St. Paul says, "let him who made the promise see about keeping it." In terms of assisting infertile couples, anything which assists nature is welcome, but nothing which replaces it (Donum vitae). But even prior to these legitimate activities in the service of spousal love, we need to value ourselves as gifts of God - ambassadors for Christ - and behave accordingly.

The medical literature is replete with studies of discontinuation rates of contraceptive steroids due to side effects, while an analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth by Child Trends (2002 to 2006-8) found that the only method of family planning whose use increased were the natural methods, and only among the 15-19 year age group. Clearly there is increased appreciation of natural processes. We are our bodies, after all.

See www.teenstarprogram.org for information about the Teen STAR® program.

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