TOB Tuesday

I'm sorry I missed this guest post on the CNN blog when it first appeared in the days after the HHS contraception mandate. Valerie Pokorny, a marriage prep mentor in San Antonio, writes, "I’m all for the progress of woman. Let’s just make sure in promoting her progress, we don’t reject something that is inherently part of her in the first place." As someone whose first reaction to the Theology of the Body was how "pro-woman" it was, I think Valerie's comments are especially pertinent. The administration, in effect, doesn't really like women too much.

The [current] administration’s primary talking point on this issue is that 'Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health.' I agree. 100 percent. But from there, the defense sounds like slick advertising for the contraceptive industry: To be a healthy woman, you need contraception. All the successful women use it. You can’t live without it. Should I so easily accept the implication that I need to alter a part of myself that’s working properly in order to be free or fulfilled? I find this premise tremendously offensive. To me, this exerts pressure tantamount to that felt by women who purge after eating to attain or maintain a particular body image. It encourages women to think that their value is somehow intrinsically tied to how sexually available and desirable they are. I thought the whole moral obligation to fulfill a husband’s sexual needs was a thing of the past... but alas, it’s been repackaged for a new secular generation. Women are still evaluated heavily on the basis of their uninhibited sexual availability, which contraception ensures precisely by severing women from their fertility. (When a woman uses “contraception” for medical reasons other than preventing a pregnancy it's not technically contraception, and the Catholic Church doesn't necessarily prohibit these uses.) My fertility is not a disease. It does not need to be repressed, manipulated, or rejected. It ought to be accepted and respected accordingly, by individuals and by society as a whole.

Read the full post here.