Contraception and Natural Law

Extract

Father Herbert McCabe's article, ‘Contraceptives and Natural Law', published in the November 1964 issue of New Blackfriars, was based on a paper which he had previously read at a philosophical conference held at Spode House. He was willing to adhere to traditional teaching and was concerned only to criticize a certain argument in its defence. I here publish the reply which I made to his paper at that time. I have the following credentials which are nowadays thought relevant: I am a married lay-woman with children and a professional career. I was not always prosperous or in possession of good prospects for the future, and am familiar with the fear of having more children, which makes contraception a temptation.

Apart from the conclusion that he draws, the fault that I find with Fr Herbert McCabe's paper is this: he connects the concept of natural law much too closely with the fact ‘that we are not isolated individuals, we are parts, fragments... of a larger community, the human race.’ It is true that some parts of the natural law are based on that fact – e.g. the prohibition on theft.

But the notion ‘against the natural law’ is simply equivalent in extension to the notion ‘what is wrong'. Belief in the natural law is the belief that the discoveries of reason about ethics are the promulgation of laws to the rational creature by the Creator. The content of the natural law is thus simply the content of ethics, so far as this is independent of revelation.