What is Contraception?

Defining my terms

This is the second post in a series about contraception. The first post can be found here.

Before I say anything about why I’m against contraception, I need to explain what I mean when I say I’m “against contraception.”

This description of my view won’t be a proof that my view is correct, though I will explain how my beliefs interact with one another. I don’t even expect this description to be particularly convincing to people who disagree with me. Convincing people isn’t my goal right now. Instead, I have two goals. First, I’d like to describe what my view is so that I can argue about it more in the future. Second, I’d like to provide some context for my stance on contraception, and show that it interacts in a consistent way with my other beliefs about sexual ethics.

To be clear, internal consistency isn’t a very high standard. Lots of belief systems are internally consistent, including some very bad ones! If I manage to show that my beliefs are internally consistent, all I’ve really done is demonstrate that there’s no way to disprove them. Or, to put it differently, if my belief system is internally consistent, there’s no way to prove (using logic alone) that another system of beliefs is superior or “more logical.”

Logic can help us show which belief systems are internally consistent, and it can show us the implications of a given belief system, but it can’t tell us which internally consistent belief system we should adopt. For that, we need to rely on other considerations, like “is this believable?” or “does this commit me to things I’m unwilling to accept?” This is where most of the real action is, but unfortunately I won’t get there today. For now, I’m just going to explain what I believe about contraception.

What I mean by “contraception”

It’s slightly confusing to say that I’m ‘against contraception’ because what I oppose is more specific than the set of things that usually get labeled ‘contraception’. What I object to is the act of “contracepting”: doing something with the goal of making a sex act infertile. I believe that intentionally interfering with the fertility of a sex act violates the dignity of sex and the dignity of the people involved.

Obviously it’s controversial to claim that sex has dignity and that consensual sex can be wrong (though I actually think most people believe something along those lines, even if they wouldn’t put it that way). I’ll come back to this later. For now, I want to clarify a bit more about what actions I would consider “contracepting,” though I’ll usually call these actions “contraception” (because, you know, it’s a real word).

For my purposes, it’s contraception (in the sense of “the thing I’m against”) when you choose to do something with the goal of making a particular sex act (or a particular set of sex acts) infertile. If I go on the Pill this year so that whatever sex I have this year is infertile, that’s contraception. If I remove a body part with the goalof making all future sex acts infertile, that’s contraception. If I use a condom in order to make a particular sex act infertile, that’s contraception. Ditto with the morning after pill, IUDs, withdrawal, etc.

(Unsurprisingly my views about contraception relate to my views on forms of sex other than intercourse, including masturbation; this is something I expect to discuss in future posts.)

However, it’s not necessarily contraception (in the sense of “contracepting” / the thing I’m against) to do something which has the effect of making sex infertile. Having a hysterectomy in orderto treat uterine cancer isn’t an act of contraception, even though it has the effect of making you infertile. Likewise, taking the Pill with the aim of treating a hormonal imbalance isn’t contraception, even if it also has the effect of making some sex acts infertile.

Intentions Matter

This distinction about intention only makes sense if I have a certain kind of objection to contraception. I’ll say more about the nature of my objection in the next section of this post. Before doing that, I want to defend the idea that intentions can matter in ethics.

Lots of our ethical thinking hinges on questions of intention. If you shove someone, it matters quite a bit whether your intention was to hurt them or to get them out of the way of an oncoming car.

In the case of contraception, I believe it’s wrong to do something which will cause infertility if your intention is to cause infertility. I believe people violate sex, and violate themselves, when they try to make the sex they’re having infertile. And when it comes to questions of violation, it’s relatively normal for intention to play a significant role: I haven’t violated my neighbor if I accidentally see him naked through the window, but it’s a different story if I’m intentionally watching him; a doctor doesn’t violate her patients by looking at photos of their naked bodies for clinical reasons, but it’s a different story if she uses these photos with the intention of gratifying herself sexually.

(Incidentally, in ethics, philosophers use the term ‘double effect’ to refer to a situation where an action has two outcomes, where it’s okay to choose the action with the intention of pursuing one of these outcomes, but where it’s not okay to choose the action with the intention of pursuing the other outcome. For instance, if your country is occupying another country, it would be wrong to withdraw troops with the intention of causing innocent people to be murdered; however, it could be okay to withdraw troops for other legitimate reasons—that is, to do it without the intention of causing murders—even though you realize it’s likely that some murders will be committed as a result of your absence.)

Before saying more about why I think contraception involves violating sex, I should also clarify that I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to intentionally try to avoid having children. I just think it’s wrong to intentionally mess with the fertility of sex as a way of going about it.

In other words, I think it can be okay to have a hysterectomy, and I think it can be okay to try to avoid pregnancy, but I don’t think it’s okay to have a hysterectomy with the intention of avoiding pregnancy.

Anyhow, the distinction about intention only makes sense if I have a certain kind of objection to contraception. So now I’ll say a few things about what kind of objection that is.

So What’s the Problem?

This is the nature of my general objection to contraception:

I believe that sex has a meaning and that this meaning is not infinitely flexible. Specifically, I think sex is a mutual (and free) act which expresses erotic desire and self-gift/self-disclosure bydoing the babymaking act (that is, by doing the act that can make babies, by having unprotected intercourse). I also think that when sex doesn’t meet this description, something has gone wrong and that this is a major problem.

Even when the failure to express this meaning is mutually consensual—for instance, when a couple agrees to use contraception—a form of dishonesty has occurred. The couple is pretending to engage in (potential) babymaking. In other words, they’re pretending to do the act that actually expresses erotic love. I believe that this kind of deception involves a violation, that it violates sex and violates the people involved.

Again, I’m just describing my view here rather than defending it. But I realize that its internal logic might be pretty confusing, so I’ll give a bit more background to my beliefs.

First, I believe that the facts about whether a person is fertile do not automatically change the nature of what they’re doing when they have sex. It’s true that when a pregnant woman has sex it defintiely is not going to cause pregnancy, but she’s still engaged in the same act as a woman who has sex and might get pregnant.

I also believe that each sex act should entail “doing your best” to make a baby. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you hope to have a baby or even that you’re thinking about babies; I just mean that you’re really going through with intercourse, that you aren’t changing the act or changing yourself with the aim of making the act less fertile.

(Note: by “doing your best” I don’t mean “doing your absolute best,” but “making a good attempt.” For instance, I’ve heard that a woman can slightly increase her chances of conception by elevating her hips for a couple hours after having sex, but I don’t think it’s necessary to do this! By “doing your best” I just mean something like “doing a proper job” or “really going through with the babymaking act.”)

This may seem counterintuitive: if an infertile couple can engage in sex, and I’m fertile, can’t I just make myself infertile, and then do the same thing that they’re doing?

The problem here is that you aren’t really doing your best if you’re changing your capacity to do a good job, and that you’re changing your capacity with the goal of ensuring that you don’t do as well. For instance, imagine you’re a professional athlete and someone has bribed you to throw a game. If you decide to take the bribe but you want to be able to say that you tried your hardest, you might think to yourself “I’ll injure myself ahead of time, or drink a lot of whisky before the game, that way I can try my hardest during the game and I’ll still be sure to lose.” But this doesn’t really change what you’ve done. Spiking your performance ahead of time isn’t meaningfully different from intentionally playing badly during the game. In both cases you’ve failed to do your best.

Avoiding Pregnancy

To be clear, I don’t think that when you have sex it needs to be part of a concerted campaign to conceive. (If this were true, couples would have a moral obligation to have sex whenever they’re fertile!) I only care about “doing your best” at the level of each act. I think it can be fine to try to avoid pregnancy, either by abstaining from sex in general, or by abstaining from sex some of the time.

To many people, strategic abstinence doesn’t look that different from contraception. Isn’t “timing” or rescheduling your sexual encounters a way of changing them, a way of making them infertile? And if I’m against contraception, shouldn’t I be against this as well?

I don’t think it’s possible to change a particular sexual encounter by rescheduling it, because the sex that you have at the future time is a different sexual encounter. When you say to someone “I want you,” and they reply “how does next Tuesday sound?” it seems wrong to describe this as “changing the sex you’d be having today by having it next week.” It seems like a better description is “not having sex today, and having sex next week.” One reason to think that this isn’t the same sexual encounter—one that’s been “tampered with” by scheduling—is that it’s conceptually confusing to talk about two possible encounters, each of which would occur at a different time, as being “the same encounter.”

(What is it that makes these possible encounters the same encounter? Does the same encounter mean “the next sexual encounter,” or “whichever encounter the people who would have had sex agree is the same encounter”? Imagine, for instance, that I decide not to have a particular sexual encounter today and “reschedule” it for next Tuesday. Now imagine that later today I change my mind and have sex, and then I also have sex next Tuesday. Which sexual encounter is the same as the one I was thinking about earlier today? (I don’t think it’s either one!) It makes sense to think of rescheduling events that are numbered or that have a particular agenda: things like “I paid for 36 piano lessons this year so I need my 35th and 36th lesson” or “we’re rescheduling the budget review for Thursday.” But sex isn’t about agenda items or hitting a certain pre-agreed number.)

To round out my explanation of what I consider “contraception,” I’m going to answer the following questions (which I’m numbering so you can skip the ones you aren’t interested in):

1. How can you think that contraceptive sex involves “lying” when people agree to have contraceptive sex? When it comes to words, two people can agree to assign a new meaning to a particular sound and then that sound just means that. Why don’t you think the same thing works for sex?

2. You think that the ethics of using the Pill depend on a person’s intention. But aren’t people famously good at deceiving themselves about their intentions? Don’t we often use self-serving narratives to rationalize decisions which have ulterior motives?

3. Let me get this straight: you think it’s fine to take the Pill, it’s fine to try to avoid pregnancy, but it’s wrong to take the Pill with the goal of avoiding pregnancy? This seems... a bit suspect.

4.  How can you say you’re “doing your best” to get pregnant when you have sex during a period of life in which you’re also doing your best to not get pregnant (by strategically avoiding sex)? Aren’t these two intentions incompatible?

5. Let’s imagine that technology gets really good and so we can know to the minute when a woman is fertile. This doesn’t really seem different from contraception. Would you be okay with tracking your fertility in this way to avoid pregnancy?

6. Your description of contraceptive sex as dishonest doesn’t square with my experience; sometimes contraceptive sex can be intimate and wonderful. Are you claiming that those experiences are just an illusion and that my relationship is hollow and meaningless?

7. What about rape?

8. What about poverty or important health reasons? Can’t these be good reasons to use contraception?

9. What about contraception outside of committed relationships?

Again, my response to these questions isn’t supposed to be a proof; instead, it’s a description of my worldview and how my various beliefs relate to one another. I’ll offer more justifications later; for now I just want to be really clear about what my views are.

1) How can you think that contraceptive sex involves “lying” when people agree to have contraceptive sex? When it comes to words, two people can agree to assign a new meaning to a particular sound and then that sound just means that. Why don’t you think the same thing works for sex? 

I don’t think think that the meaning of sex is infinitely flexible, even when two people agree that they want to use sex to mean something different.

It’s true that you and I could invent a secret language called “BRenglish” which is just like english except that “blue” and “red” have switched meanings. There wouldn’t be a problem with this, nor would there be a problem with us telling one another (in BRenglish) “the sky is red!” But a word like “blue” is pretty arbitrary, and has fixed meaning only because people agree to use it that way. Whereas there are other things which we can’t necessarily change by mutual agreement.

For instance, imagine that I have an extreme temper and I often yell abusive and hurtful things at my friends when I’m in a bad mood. If you and I are friends, and you are a forgiving person, you may try to make excuses for me and try to avoid taking my rants too seriously. However, it’s not really possible for us to come to an agreement that my bad behavior doesn’t count as bad behavior. For example, let’s imagine we try to make an agreement that whenever I speak above a certain decibel level, my words actually just mean “I’m having a tough day!” Now let’s imagine that I scream something horrible at you; later, I run into you and am confused to see that you’re upset. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“You told me that you’re glad my mom died because ‘it serves me right.’” you reply.

“Ah,” I say, “but remember our agreement? I was yelling ‘I’m glad your mom died because it serves you right,’ and since I was yelling you know that my words really meant that I was having a tough day. It’s like BRenglish! You shouldn’t take these things personally!” This would obviously be an inadequate response on my part. This is a situation where my action—screaming abusive and hurtful things at you—has a meaning which we can’t change, even by mutual agreement

Of course, this screaming example involves hurting someone’s feelings, which contraception (obviously) doesn’t always do. I’m not saying that using contraception is like verbally abusing someone; I’m just pointing out that we can’t always agree to assign a different meaning to a particular interaction.

The next posts will involve more detail about why I think sex is the kind of thing I think it is; for now, my point is simply that some things aren’t flexible, and that I believe sex is one of those things.

2) You think that the ethics of using the Pill depend on a person’s intention. But aren’t people famously good at deceiving themselves about their intentions? Don’t we often use self-serving narratives to rationalize decisions which have ulterior motives?

People often do deceive themselves about their intentions, but I don’t think this shows that intention is a bad or irrelevant ethical framework; it just shows that sometimes people aren’t honest about what their intentions are.

You can test your intentions by asking how your decisions are affected (or how they would be affected) by different circumstances. In the case of a doctor who looks at naked photographs of her patients, a good test would be “does she spend more time looking at the patients she finds attractive?” or “if it’s no longer medically necessary, does she still look at the photos?” (If the answer to these questions is “yes,” that’s a problem.) In the case of taking the Pill to treat acne, a good test would be “if my doctor told me that there’s a new medication which is more effective, cheaper, and has fewer side effects, would I switch to that medication?” (If the answer to that question is “no,” then I am intentionally contracepting.)

It’s important to note that when I’m talking about intentions I’m not talking about whether you’re happy or sad about the outcome in question. A person who isn’t in a good position to have a child might feel relieved to be on a medication that has the effect of interfering with fertility. But this sense of relief doesn’t mean she’s intentionally interfering with fertility; she’s only intentionally interfering with fertility if she’s taking the medication with the aim of avoiding pregnancy.

3) Let me get this straight: you think it’s fine to take the Pill, it’s fine to try to avoid pregnancy, but it’s wrong to take the Pill with the goal of avoiding pregnancy? This seems... a bit suspect.

There are plenty of less controversial ethical questions where a particular action is sometimes acceptable, a particular goal is sometimes acceptable, but where using that action as a way to pursue that goal is not acceptable.

For instance, let’s imagine that I’ve promised you I’ll do my best (within reason) to attend your piano concert. Here are two ways that I might end up missing your concert, but without breaking my promise: first, I could get hit by a car and go to the emergency room instead of your concert; second, I could ask you to release me from my promise and you agree. However, it doesn’t follow from these two facts—from the fact that I can sometimes go to the ER instead of a concert I’ve promised to attend without breaking the promise, and from the fact that there are legitimate ways of trying to get out of a concert I’ve promised to attend—that whenever I want to skip a concert I’ve promised to attend I can simply drive to the ER instead.

Going to the ER instead of the piano concert doesn’t involve promise-breaking if I’m going to the ER because I’m injured and need to go, but it does involve promise breaking—assuming I haven’t been released from the promise—if I’m going to the ER in order to skip the concert, that is, with the intention of skipping the concert.

This is obviously a rather silly example, but my point is just that there are situations where a particular action might be legitimate, where a particular goal might be legitimate, but where using the action to pursue the goal is not legitimate.

The view that it’s wrong to intentionally mess with the fertility of sex is compatible with the view that it’s okay to try to avoid pregnancy by some ways (e.g., by avoiding sex) and with the view that it can be okay to take the Pill (e.g. to treat hormonal imbalances).

4) How can you say you’re “doing your best” to get pregnant when you have sex during a period of life in which you’re also doing your best to not get pregnant (by strategically avoiding sex)? Aren’t these two intentions incompatible? Also, does “doing your best” involve an obligation to optimize your fertility—for instance, by taking supplements or undoing a vasectomy?

These two intentions are not necessarily incompatible.

Here’s an analogy. Every time a student does well on her final exams, it helps her GPA. But it’s possible for her to try to do her best on each final exam while also trying to lower her GPA in general. For instance, imagine a student who has the highest GPA in her class and who is afraid of public speaking. She realizes that she’s on track to be valedictorian, so she tries to find a really hard class in a subject that she’s not naturally gifted in. She takes this class, studies hard, and does her best on the final exam. But she knows that she’s unlikely to get better than a B+.

In this example, she really is doing her best to perform well on the final. In other words, within the class she really is trying to get a high GPA. At the same time, she’s also engaged in a more general campaign to lower her GPA by choosing a difficult class instead of an easy class.

Here, she’s not spiking her performance on the particular final that she’s taking because she really is getting the best grade she’s capable of getting on that final. (She isn’t intentionally doing poorly on it by, say, getting drunk before the test, neglecting to study, or intentionally writing down wrong answers.) She’s just taking a class where “doing her best” won’t lead to particularly impressive results.

In the case of contraception, it’s possible to do  your best at the level of each act, while only engaging in acts where you expect that “doing your best” isn’t likely to lead to particularly impressive results.

This raises a related question: if you're infertile because of a medical problem do you have an obligation to try to improve your fertility? And if you've had a vasectomy do you need to undo it? Here, I think the answer is “not necessarily” or “only within reason.” If the only reason you’re neglecting to improve your fertility is that you want to avoid conceiving then you’re not “doing your best” (within reason) at the level of each sex act. But I think “wanting to avoid surgery” or “focusing on other things” can be legitimate reasons to neglect improving your fertility. Again, the question hinges on intention.

5) Let’s imagine that technology gets really good and so we can know to the minute when a woman is fertile. This doesn’t really seem different from contraception. Would you be okay with tracking your fertility in this way to avoid pregnancy?

Yes. My objection isn’t connected to whether the program you’re pursuing is “effective” at avoiding pregnancy. I’m only concerned with whether you’re tampering with sex.

6) Your description of contraceptive sex as dishonest doesn’t square with my experience; sometimes contraceptive sex can be intimate and wonderful. Are you claiming that those experiences are just an illusion and that my relationship is hollow and meaningless?

I’m not claiming that your relationship is hollow and meaningless, but I do think there’s something illusory about the experience.

I think it’s possible to experience good things connected to bad stuff that we do. For example, let’s imagine I’ve cheated on my husband with a stranger. This was not a good thing to do. But I apologize and he forgives me, and we’re patching things up. Then I learn that I’m pregnant, and the father isn’t my husband. The father isn’t interested in raising the child so my husband adopts her and we raise her together. Now obviously we should love that child and rejoice in her, instead of regarding her with suspicion or hostility because she is the “product” of something bad I did. It’s true that she wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t done something wrong, but it’s very, very good that she exists.

Again, I’m not saying that contraceptive sex is identical to adultery. My point is just that sometimes things that are wrong can have real goods associated with them, and we don’t need to reject these goods. In thinking about contraceptive sex we may have had in the past, we can still have regard for the intimacy, the other positive aspects of the relationship, etc.

(To be clear, I don’t think that contraceptive sex is just “less good” sex; I think that by contracepting you’re acting against the meaning of sex, and I believe that this makes the sex dishonest.)

7) What about rape?

I certainly think that somebody who is raped (or who expects to be raped) can intentionally take steps to make that act of sexual violation infertile. (For instance, I don’t know whether this is true but I’ve heard that nuns who live in particularly violent areas sometimes take oral contraceptives because they are at a high risk of being raped.) I object to contraception in non-coercive sex because I believe it deforms an act which has a particular significance. Because rape is not consentual it doesn’t have the significance; it is already hideously deformed and can’t be “violated” by the use of contraception.

8)  What about poverty and important health reasons? Can’t these be good reasons to use contraception?

The question of avoiding pregnancy can be more urgent for people who are in difficult circumstances, or who would be in medical danger from being pregnant. But if I’m right that it’s a violation to intentionally interfere with the fertility of a sex act, this will still be true even in cases where people have a very good reason to avoid pregnancy.

I’ll write more about the question of poverty and other hardships in a future post, but for now I just want to say that yes, of course poverty, illness, or other difficulties can make it more burdensome  to avoid the use of contraception. However, the fact that a particular ethical demand will be harder for some people to follow than others doesn’t necessarily mean that the ethical demand isn’t real.

We should still try to figure out what is right, even if doing the right thing turns out to be harder for people in some circumstances than for people in others. Instead of leading us to relativism, this difference in easiness should lead us to treat one another gently, and try to alleviate one another’s poverty and hardship to the extent that we can.

9) What about contraception outside of committed relationships?

I still think it’s wrong to have contraceptive sex in a non-committed relationship because it involves pretending to do something which signifies intimacy-by-doing-it without actually doing it. (I also think that it’s unjust to a child to conceive her without mutual parental commitment, which is one of the reasons why I believe that people who aren’t married shouldn’t have sex.)

Up Next

My next post will include more information about why I hold these views. If you have questions/comments about this post, or topics which you’d like to see addressed in future posts, please let me know in the comments section!