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Debate at Boulder campus on contraception draws full house

By Nissa LaPoint

Two professors debated the harmfulness of contraception to a sold-out college hall Jan. 26, countering each other on the benefits and harm it has on relationships, health, society and marriage.

During a nearly two-hour debate, Janet Smith, chair of life ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, argued that contraception poses serious health risks to women and results in a culture of rampant pre-marital sex and broken families.

Christine Gudorf, author of eight books on religious ethics, countered Smith’s arguments saying that contraception is a tool that allows women to space births, which reduces infant mortality rates, and also relieves the financial burdens of children and alleviates poverty in Third-World countries.

The debate was hosted by the Boulder-based Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, a division of the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The annual Great Debate was held in light of recent news concerning contraception and its impact on religious institutions, primarily the federal mandate that all health organizations provide access to free contraceptives, said Father Peter Mussett, moderator of the debate and administrator of the center.

“Too often the conversation about contraceptives, both inside the Catholic Church as well as about the Catholic Church’s teaching, has focused merely on the Church’s authoritative teaching about how they’ve been strictly forbidden without the difficult discourse, which brings about a deeper understanding,” Father Mussett said.

Gudorf began the debate with statistics about the benefits of spacing births. Infant mortality, if a woman is able to space births by 36 months, will drop by as much as 35 percent and decrease rates of mortality of children 5 and younger by 40 percent, she said.

In addition, pregnancy’s strain on women’s organs and the resulting health risks for malnourished mothers calls for the need to spread contraception to the poorest countries, she said.

“For women, no contraceptive that we know of today is as dangerous as regular non- contraceptive martial sex for women,” Gudorf said.

Countering that, Smith said numerous studies point to the correlation of contraceptive use and significant health risks including breast cancer, liver disease, stroke and high blood pressure.

The World Health Organization, she said, recently raised the threat level of oral contraceptives to a first level carcinogenic—any substance directly involved in causing cancers—due to scientific research.

Women on the contraceptive pill are more prone to other side effects including mood changes, weight gain and nausea.

“I’m sure every woman in this room wants to gain weight, be more prone to depression and be more irritable,” Smith said drawing laughs from the audience.

The two professors also discussed natural family planning, the Church’s approved birth regulation method for grave circumstances, and its impact on the environment and marriage relationships.

Smith called natural family planning “green sex” because it has no carbon footprint or impact on the environment. The method doesn’t result in waste and does not release chemicals in the water like oral contraceptives, as a local study on Boulder Creek revealed about these chemicals’ mutating effect on fish’s gender, she said.

Gudorf rebutted that NFP requires more discipline and education than most people are capable of.

“People need an effective, safe method of contraception because health and life are the primary goods” Gudorf said.

Beyond its health risks, Smith said contraception is detrimental to what men and women really want: to love, to be loved and have lifelong stable relationships.

Within a 10-year period after the pill came on the market in the ‘60s, divorce more than doubled, and children born to unwed mothers rose to 42 percent, she said. Because it enables more pre-marital sex, the pill also hinders judgment on finding a good partner and disables couples’ full relationship development before marriage, she continued.

Yet those who abstain from pre-marital sex and rely on natural family planning in marriage have a 2 percent divorce rate, she said.

While infant mortality is a horrible thing, contraception creates more societal issues.

“Contraception will raise a whole other set of problems,” Smith said. “No divorce rate means financial stability, end of poverty and no harm to society.”