It’s NFP Awareness week. While I’m not married, I am human, and I am trained in theology; I know married couples, and I’ve even read books on the moral life, sexuality—Catholic and otherwise. From what I can tell with all the blogging and conversing and observing and questioning I’ve done is that in general, short of “do good, avoid evil,” there is no absolutely absolute abstracted categorical imperative by which we can judge this individual’s actions in this circumstance of this life. Killing people is always wrong? Enter the entire spectrum of just war debates, which inform us that while murder is always wrong, sometimes killing a person is not murder. Bring in something like sexuality, and everyone’s passions get so twitterpated that we
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In her early 20s, she began to experience a variety of health problems. After going to a gynecologist, she was advised to get tested for hormonal anomalies with a top endocrinologist. This endocrinologist took all kinds of blood work and lab tests, and a week or so before Christmas, called her to inform her that at 23, her hormone levels were not what they needed to be—she was effectively not producing enough female hormones for her eggs to grow large enough to receive a sperm. This woman, an unmarried Catholic, was being told that without medical treatment, it was not likely that, should she marry, she would ever conceive a child. Talk about a Christmas for the memory books. However, there were courses of treatment that might help her, should she ever be in a position to have a child: she could increase her female hormone production by means of medical intervention over the near future, and that might encourage her body to begin picking up the production of female hormones. Better yet, this treatment wouldn’t even be too costly, as we live in a world where there is readily available tabs of estrogen and progesterone available at a low cost. We call them birth control pills. It was likely such treatment would be effective and increase her hormones sufficiently that should she later get married, she would have much better odds of getting …show more content…
However, when approaching the moral life, the means, in this case artificial hormones, seemed to become conflated with the end they they often served: contraception. And so, everyone stands against the Pill in order to stand against contraception. Meanwhile our heroine began to feel shame beyond the shame she felt because her body apparently had no interest in doing the main thing a female body was supposed to do—she also began to be ashamed of and scared about taking the medicine that was hopefully going to, if she eventually married, allow her to have children, even though she knew it was morally okay and that all medicine comes with
In her early 20s, she began to experience a variety of health problems. After going to a gynecologist, she was advised to get tested for hormonal anomalies with a top endocrinologist. This endocrinologist took all kinds of blood work and lab tests, and a week or so before Christmas, called her to inform her that at 23, her hormone levels were not what they needed to be—she was effectively not producing enough female hormones for her eggs to grow large enough to receive a sperm. This woman, an unmarried Catholic, was being told that without medical treatment, it was not likely that, should she marry, she would ever conceive a child. Talk about a Christmas for the memory books. However, there were courses of treatment that might help her, should she ever be in a position to have a child: she could increase her female hormone production by means of medical intervention over the near future, and that might encourage her body to begin picking up the production of female hormones. Better yet, this treatment wouldn’t even be too costly, as we live in a world where there is readily available tabs of estrogen and progesterone available at a low cost. We call them birth control pills. It was likely such treatment would be effective and increase her hormones sufficiently that should she later get married, she would have much better odds of getting …show more content…
However, when approaching the moral life, the means, in this case artificial hormones, seemed to become conflated with the end they they often served: contraception. And so, everyone stands against the Pill in order to stand against contraception. Meanwhile our heroine began to feel shame beyond the shame she felt because her body apparently had no interest in doing the main thing a female body was supposed to do—she also began to be ashamed of and scared about taking the medicine that was hopefully going to, if she eventually married, allow her to have children, even though she knew it was morally okay and that all medicine comes with