The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly

According to the contralife argument, because both contraception and natural family planning (NFP) entail at least a contralife motivation to have marital intercourse but avoid pregnancy, both should be forbidden—a conclusion rejected by the natural law tradition and Church teaching, which forbid contraception but permit NFP. This paper argues that the principle of double effect (PDE) can be applied to explain why contraception is forbidden but NFP is permissible. This double-effect analysis evaluates the good effect of procreation and unity against the bad effect of lustful sexual pleasure. This paper argues that contraception fails to meet the conditions of the PDE, because it intends sexual pleasure in isolation from procreation and unity and is therefore forbidden. Conversely, NFP meets the conditions of the PDE because, as with all permissible sexual intercourse, it intends sexual pleasure in conjunction with procreation and unity and is therefore itself permissible.

This essay seeks to establish that Catholic community pharmacists should refuse to verify, dispense, and counsel on hormonal medications used for contraception on the grounds of professional and personal beliefs as these services constitute immoral immediate material cooperation. In this controversial area of patient care, pharmacists are more frequently being called upon to facilitate medication use for contraceptive purposes. Contraceptive acts are believed by some healthcare providers to be morally harmful to a patient’s well-being. Pharmacists who hold beliefs that contraception does not promote positive patient outcomes are professionally bound to refuse immediate cooperation through providing pharmaceutical services related to contraception.

Irene Alexander’s article in last spring’s issue of this journal criticizes the new natural law (NNL) account of sexual ethics, including Melissa Moschella’s defense of that view in a previous article also in this journal. Alexander claims that the NNL account adopts an empiricist view of nature and that NNL’s rejection of the perverted faculty argument is contrary to the Magisterium. Here Moschella responds to Alexander’s criticisms by (1) clarifying NNL theorists’ understanding of the distinction between speculative and practical reason through an explanation of Aquinas’s account of the four orders, (2) correcting Alexander’s erroneous portrayal of NNL arguments against contraception, and (3) arguing that the NNL account of sexual ethics is not only in line with magisterial teaching, but offers a better philosophical defense of that teaching than the view Alexander proposes.

Directive 36 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services gives guidance to health care professionals on the reactive administration of contraceptives to women in instances of isolated rape. This paper examines the moral permissibility of long-term proactive contraceptive use in instances of repeated marital rape by comparing it to the moral permissibility of reactive contraceptive use in cases of isolated rape found in directive 36.

Persons who identity as LGBTQ+ should be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Under the guise of helping such persons, legislation is surreptitiously appearing in several countries seeking to ban so-called conversion therapy. While the definition of the term remains concerningly vague, the terms of enforcement for alleged offences tend to be precisely delineated, often including provisions that curtail Christian catechesis, teaching, and preaching in the areas of human dignity and sexuality. These problematic and repressive initiatives can prevent access to any psychotherapy that is not strictly gender-affirming. This article reviews and assesses conversion therapy in support of a judicious approach to the practice, accurately understood. It reviews past abuses and misunderstandings while considering the merits of conversion therapy and related therapeutic and pastoral approaches. Concerns about gender-affirming interventions are considered, especially for youth and teenagers, and efficacy claims around conversion therapies and related psychotherapies are also discussed.

Although there is discussion among ethicists about the permissibility of actions on the antenatal placenta, these discussions rarely take seriously the metaphysics involved. Rather, authors resort to opinion on how the placenta comes to be and for whose good it exists. This paper takes these metaphysical questions seriously. Through discussion of the biology of the placenta, I conclude that it is a shared organ of the mother and the fetus. In an analogy to the ethics of conjoined twinning, I conclude that actions on the placenta must take the good of both the mother and the fetus into account.

Abortion jurisprudence in the United States has been criticized by many for allowing the destruction of millions of lives. What many may not know is that the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion in all fifty states was very similar to another Supreme Court decision, namely, Dred Scott v. Sanford. The parallels between these two cases are astounding, revealing how dehumanization, while a very old idea, is almost always achieved through the same means. A legal analysis of Roe v. Wade, and subsequently Planned Parenthood v. Casey, shows that these cases are both morally and legally unjustified. Just like Dred Scott, Roe, by dehumanizing a specific group of individuals, is a case which does not belong in the American legal system.

The question of when human life begins is critical in debates related to life issues. While there are a variety of proposals as to how an organism should be defined, many biologists and ethicists, particularly Catholics, have approached this issue by arguing that fertilization defines the beginning of a new organism. Examining the processes of fission and fusion, which take place before gastrulation, provides strong evidence for when human life beings and therefore how it should be defined. Among the four dominant theories, regulative fission and fusion are the best explanations in terms of being the most consistent with the biological data. This explanation of twinning provides compelling evidence that fertilization is not a necessary condition for human generation, although it may be a sufficient condition. While fertilization generates the vast majority of human beings, additional human beings may rarely be generated during fission events.

When discussing the morality of gonad transplantation for procreative purposes, it can be tempting to examine the act solely qua reproductive technology. This paper, instead, compares the gonad to the kidney and evaluates the act qua organ transplantation. First, the author expounds a hierarchy of organs in relation to personal identity. Next, after considering an organ’s subjective effect on identity, the author elucidates an organ’s objective effect by ranking the powers of the soul and the goods of the human person. The hierarchy of organs shows the gonad to be among the highest organs and most perfective of the human person. Because of the gonad’s highly personal nature, it cannot licitly be directed to another’s good.