Eros and Agape

Part 2, Asymmetrical Burdens

In the last post I described how Catholic thinking concerning artificial contraception makes an appeal to what is called "natural law." That is to say, Catholic thought reads a moral logic into the biology of human reproduction. Sex is biologically "for" reproduction. That is the biological "purpose" of sex. Thus, to artificially block that purpose is to thwart God's creative intentions for human sexuality.

Now, I am not a theologian or a Christian ethicist. So any concerns I raise here likely have excellent, even standard, rejoinders. But if I were to have a long conversation with a Catholic theologian or ethicist about the role of natural law in reproductive ethics, there are two issues I'd bring up.

The first issue is biblical.

I'm not going to quibble with anyone who points to Genesis 1's "be fruitful and multiply" to make the point that God created human sexuality for human reproduction. This is a biological given. However, Genesis goes on to describe how human reproduction became wounded by the Fall. And while men have their own burden to carry, the reproductive burden of the Fall lands upon women. God says to Eve:

“I will make your pangs in childbirth exceedingly great;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”

Much can be said about this text and its implications. I simply want to make the point that, due to the Fall, there is something cursed about human reproduction, a curse that is carried specifically by women. A curse that also seems directly implicated in patriarchal gender roles ("he shall rule over you").

Now, when it comes to the cursed aspects of human life we generally haven't minded, from an ethical or theological perspective, interventions which lighten that burden. For example, I wear contacts. We go to doctors for medical help. The ground was cursed for Adam, making agricultural labor difficult and burdensome. In response, man invented the wheel, the plow, the cotton gin, and on and on. My point here is that we generally don't object to technological interventions that ease the burdens of the cursed aspects of human existence. So while it is true that sex is "for" reproduction, reproduction is also cursed. Reproduction is burdensome upon women. Genesis 1 is followed by Genesis 3. Consequently, it seems legitimate to create technologies that ease the curse when it comes to human reproduction.

A rejoinder here is that there isn't a Catholic prohibition about using painkillers during childbirth. So if we read the pain of childbirth narrowly in Genesis 3 the curse upon Eve doesn't have any moral implications for the use of artificial contraception. Interestingly, however, the Hebrew of Genesis 3:16 literally means, not "labor pains," but "your pain and conception." Which is curious given that conception is not painful. That is, unless, conception is itself the onset of a painful burden, that there is some dismaying aspect upon discovering oneself to be pregnant. Consequently, if we read "in pain you shall bring forth children" more broadly, to include the entire burden of pregnancy and the prolonged childcare afterwards, as well as note how these burdens have been implicated in men "ruling over" women, then our moral attention shifts towards these burdens along with how they have twisted egalitarian gender relations.

My second issue converges upon the first and concerns the impact of evolutionary history upon human sexuality and reproduction. To be sure, not everyone will be willing to entertain this line of inquiry. But if we are willing to admit, or assume for the sake of argument, that human sexuality has been shaped by a long evolutionary history that history should be taken into account when we speak of nature. If so, I have a concern about extracting moral imperatives from human reproduction.

Specifically, if you look at evolutionary accounts of human sexuality, like David Buss' The Evolution of Desire or Geoffery Miller's The Mating Mind, the biological imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" has had asymmetrical impacts upon the sexual psychologies of men and women. Simplifying greatly, from a biological perspective sex has been "low stakes" for men. Consequently, "being fruitful and multiplying" for men has meant maximizing sexual opportunity. Evolutionary psychologists point to this adaptive history to explain why men, across cultures, are more open to casual and anonymous sexual encounters.

For women, by contrast, sex has been "high stakes." In ancestral hunter-gather contexts, getting pregnant put a woman's life at risk. Along with the burden of caring for a newborn infant. Facing this adaptive burden, so the evolutionary argument goes, women evolved a more discriminating approach to sex in seeking out a "high-investment" mate. Evolutionary psychologists point to this history to account for cross-cultural female mate preferences that prioritize emotional attachment and material resources.

Interestingly, this evolutionary history points toward the same conclusion of Genesis 3: Reproductive burdens are asymmetrical for men and women. Women have had to evolve sexual strategies to protect themselves when having sex in ways men have never had to do. This brings me to my point: Nature draws our attention toward procreation but also toward an asymmetrical burden that demands attention and care.

Now, I'm not suggesting that these observations about Eve's curse and evolutionary biology invalidate the Catholic position regarding the use of artificial contraception. I am merely suggesting that there is more to "nature" than the simple observation that having sex is "for" procreation. On one reading of nature, yes, you could say that the "natural" telos of sex is having children and then read some moral content into that observation. But upon another reading of nature you see an asymmetrical burden, a locus of suffering, and read some moral content into that observation as well. That is to say, when the Catholic church teaches that "each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life" because "conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful," a lot seems to be missing from this picture of nature.

This isn't to imply that eros isn't in need of mortification. As I shared in the last post, the Catholic vision of transforming eros into agape sits at the heart of the Christian vision of sex. So the concerns I've raised in this post do not challenge that moral imperative. Rather, my concern here is that, when we use nature to mortify eros, this mortification is inherently asymmetrical making it an unfair tool for spiritual formation. I think there's a better, symmetrical path for the mortification of eros. I'll turn to that in the next post.