On Sex and Freedom

Contraception, IVF, Autonomy, Vitalism

God is both truly free and truly good, and everyone who has ever been was both willed and loved by God. This is true of those born out of wedlock, or to single mothers; those only ambivalently wanted (or not wanted at all) by their birth parents. It’s true of those who were conceived in horrific violence, in rape and in incest. It’s true of those who have lived only a few days, hours, or minutes, and it’s true of those who were never allowed to be born. It’s even true of those who come to be in a manner that stretches the distinction between making and begetting, coming about not by the ordinary embrace of a man and a woman but by the mechanical reconstruction of that event’s consequence in a laboratory. It will remain true even if such technology should come to reconstruct bearing and birth altogether.

Human persons are made in the image and likeness of the One who made them, which is to say that they are made for freedom and for love. The love from which they ultimately come is infinite, and so it can truly be said that it affords them an infinite dignity. But to speak of such dignity apart from gift is to erect the most grotesque of idols, whether those of man or ego. To speak of rights apart from gift is to talk of contracts and treaties, and to muddle along at the lukewarm edges of an endless war. The only freedom worthy of a person is that which they receive from the One who can be wholly free, and the only love worthy of a person is from the One who is wholly unconditioned (and so can give it unconditionally). We are creatures, but creatures who are made to live and love like God. Gift is the primordial moral fact, and the only fact of ultimate moral salience.

How we come to be is a sign of what we are, and it can more or less reflect the truth of the matter. Its given conditions and limitations orient us to reality. Children born in the litany of circumstances described above are not diminished for it, but they have really and truly been deprived of something that they had a right to have. Children are not the subjects of contracts or treaties, and their rights are not delineations or terms of service. “Rights” meant here are only corollaries of what it is that children already are.

Children have firstly have a right to be born, that is, they have a right to know that someone bore them because they were loved before they were present to us.

Children also have a right to a mother and a father. For all of human history, and for now at least it mercifully remains the case, a mother’s presence has been inescapable. Everyone who has been, has been borne by and born of a woman. But a father’s presence has never been a certainty. In that, it mirrors the apparently uncertain presence of the Father who has first loved.

This asymmetry between men and women is the widest gulf in the whole of human nature. Marriage is either the burden which grudgingly compensates for, or the gift which fulfills and consummates, that primal and ineradicable dissimilarity. It’s through the relationship of man and woman that the world comes to be. How men and women receive the burden, gift, and mystery of their difference almost entirely shapes what sort of world it is.

Children have a right to come from love. The mechanics of our beginnings are such that they can and often do come about by violence, specifically the sexual violence of men towards women. Even beyond the obvious and gratuitous violence which transgresses the laws and norms of any human community, there is an ordinary violence bound up in the demands of tribe and cult for new blood. It is a violence that has obligated millennia of women to marry, with neither choice of the time nor the bridegroom, and a violence that has permeated many such marriages throughout the ages. It is a violence that has forced countless children to bear children.

The freedom not to marry and bear children is a radical freedom. It is a freedom which profoundly relativizes the extrinsic ties of nation and culture, and limits what they might demand for their continuance. God may or may not be a respecter of persons, but He will make all else to be. Such a freedom not only liberates women from an expectedly violent subjugation, but it likewise constitutes the right of children to be born of a freely given love.

Children also have a right to be a gift. Parents do not have a right to possess their children, and particular couples do not have a right to have them at all. We can no more demand that children vicariously fulfill our private ambitions than can states demand that they fulfill the needs of common utility. We have no right to a “legacy” and states have no right to a workforce. We do each have a right to marry, and that right entails a promise of fidelity and stability through which children may come about. They then have a right to expect such fidelity and stability from their would-be parents. But if such children do come about, they remain a gift of the One who made them and to whom they ultimately belong.

Conformity to all these things makes immanent and visible what is already and unchangeably true, that we are born of freedom and love and for the same. That reality is not an ideal, but it is the actual truth, so neither does the Church teach what she does about sex and marriage to elucidate an ideal, but rather to make that truth visible in a world where it is otherwise entirely eclipsed. In evident history, marriage is mostly a complicated mess of violence and power, the cold attribution of responsibility of particular men to particular children, as well as the shrewd means of securing economic arrangements. But the gulf between the goodness of something at its existential origin, and the brokenness of the actual empirical testimony of the same in time, is true of almost everything human. It is a gulf only traversed by faith.

How things are on the whole, and how they seem to have always been, lies at an enormous and unbearable distance from how they are made to be. It is the distance of sin, and it is our great burden. The Church can illuminate what’s real only by crossing that distance and exceeding it, and she does this only through God’s Mercy. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. She can only do so because God Himself has first done done the same for our sake. She was born from the wound in His side. He made us freely and He made us good. He redeemed us freely, shared our suffering and bore the wages of our fault freely, that we might be made perfect. Just as the world begins in gift, it is made new in mercy.

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In the 20th century and into the 21st, western societies (and by the extension of their influence, much of the world), have accomplished a great sundering. They have largely divorced sex from the gift and burden of new life. To the extent that we are always and everywhere largely unfree, formed haphazardly in cultural debris and convenience, this was something of a technological inevitability. Artificial contraception made it possible, and so entropy made it the de facto cultural norm.

Sex without children has born its fruit over its few generations: the withering of marriage as an institution of common life through both attrition and widespread divorce (and so a growing share of children who have been raised without fathers), ~70 million deaths by abortion since Roe vs. Wade, and in the coming generations a growing polarization between men and women. Despite having neutralized the fundamental fact which makes their difference most intelligible, men and women as a whole have not bridged the gap in their experience of the world or of each other. They have however, deepened their confusion about who or what they are and what it is they ought to want from each other. Having greeted historic and fleeting norms of gender and culture with a healthy skepticism, they have replaced them with a mosaic of impressions and imitations, sometimes truly authentic and personal, and other times largely mimetic caricature. Some of the earliest impressions young boys and girls get to form their relationship to and sense of the opposite sex are through ubiquitous pornography.

It should be said that all this has come alongside a partial relief of some historic evils. Rates of domestic violence seem to have broadly declined, partly due to women’s capacity to leave situations of abuse, and their ability to form networks of social support apart from men. Women have won a share in domains of common life from which they had largely been excluded, and their presence in such domains is both justly due to them and a gift to the flourishing of a humane world. Women constitute half of humankind, and their participation broadly in the intellectual disciplines which seek to understand what we are and how we live well serves to correct a historic masculine lopsidedness in thought. It should also be noted that social action aimed at alleviating these evils and winning these rights for women well precedes the sexual revolution, and was often lead by women who were not concerned about contraception and who keenly regarded abortion as an extension of the violence against which they were already animated.

In any case, whatever causal just-so stories can be credibly told from the cacophony and debris of that history, it remains true that what it has handed us is a world and a set of norms which cannot continue itself in the plainest sense: there will not be enough children born to sustain it. Where people do have bigger families, they are overwhelmingly formed in subcultures which do not share the broader values of the society of which they are a part, and where people have most thoroughly appropriated those broader values they do not well reproduce them. For the latter sort, the decision to have or not to have children has growingly become a “lifestyle choice”, like having a dog or living by the ocean. The burdens and needs of parents can be casually dismissed as private business, of only mild concern to friends who haven’t made the same choices, and of no concern at all to strangers.

But the economic and political structures in which we are enmeshed, however much they are removed from the primitive mentality of tribe and cult, persist in their demand for new blood. Demographic decline is not only an economic and political problem, but it becomes a great pressure towards injustice concerning the very young and the very old. The demands and constraints on the former will become greater and greater, and resentment towards the latter for continuing to live will become more acute. The growing political calls to legalize medical killing have an indubitable hidden fuel in such pressures.

But if the 20th century gave witness to many of the evils of divorcing sex from children, the 21st is likely to display the evils of divorcing children from sex. IVF and other “assisted reproductive technologies” already entail and facilitate the creation and wanton destruction of many distinct human lives in embryo. They also already offer the potential of eugenic choices that have not before been possible, the prioritization of a high IQ or a particular sex. As these technologies proliferate, they will mark an ever larger share of who it is that comes to be born. The gift and miracle of life will be more and more obscured in the demand for control or in the enormous commercial industries which come to mediate it. The rise of surrogate motherhood already mixes the reception of children with commodification and cold transaction. If it’s legitimate for those who want children to buy them into existence, there is little barrier against states who need children eventually doing the same at greater scale. And so the order of gift in all that is will be further eclipsed by the order of possession and use.

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The only credible human freedom is a creaturely freedom, and so a conditioned one. It is always and everywhere conditioned by circumstances and relationships which are first given to us. It is made no less real for that. The great proclamation of the Church is that the God who’s given us such freedom loves us, that He wills our good and that He orders its expression always and everywhere to Himself. Chaste integrity is essential to that call. Unlike conditional opportunities, made possible in fragile and limited circumstances, chaste love is always and everywhere possible for us. It is the love by which we offer charity and friendship to all, and the whole of ourselves to our spouses. It’s the love by which children may come to be, as gifts, through our free and full gift to one another. It is the love by which we will our children well but refuse to possess or control them.

We take a risk in following the call of the Church. Loving well risks heartbreak and grief, risks receiving more burden than we can bear, and the freedom not to marry risks letting cultures and nations and states wither and pass away. It is a risk we can take with confidence only in the firm knowledge that God loves us and is calling us to a good no eye has yet seen and no ear has yet heard. It is a trust that God can and will make the world better than it is entirely through our freedom in following Him, and through the scandal of His mercy in the places where we don’t. We can trust this because God’s freedom, unlike ours, is truly unconditioned and His good will, unlike ours, is truly unconditional.