The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (10 page)

At the time, birth control was an especially contentious issue among both Catholic theologians and the laity. Many of the faithful were chafing under the church’s absolute ban on contraception, and some in the hierarchy were beginning to question traditional doctrine. In 1963, Dutch bishop William Bekkers, speaking on national television, said that couples alone should decide on the size of their families: “This is a matter for their own consciences with which nobody should interfere.” Bekkers didn’t endorse birth control, but he called for an open discussion. A few months later the rest of the country’s Catholic hierarchy seconded these sentiments in a statement on the birth control pill.
⁵⁶

Meanwhile, many in the church were aware of the increasing salience of the population issue on the international stage, and the pope sought guidance in dealing with it at the United Nations. By most accounts neither Pope John XXIII nor his successor, Pope Paul VI, shared the kind of obsession with sex and fertility that marked the papacy of John Paul II. They were, however, hemmed in by church history. The church’s hostility to contraception had been consistent for hundreds of years, though both the intensity of the opposition and the rationale for it have shifted considerably over time. And in 1930, in the encyclical
Casti Connubii,
Pope Pius XI did much to foreclose the possibility of a liberal evolution in Catholic doctrine.

That year, at the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Church outraged the Vatican by becoming the first mainline Christian denomination to explicitly sanction contraception. A few months later the pope responded with
Casti Connubii,
which declared artificial contraception “intrinsically evil,” something that could never be permitted for any reason. As author Robert McClory pointed out, even murder and theft aren’t considered “intrinsically evil,” since both could be justified by extenuating circumstances.
⁵⁷

Casti Connubii
left later popes little flexibility. To amend the church’s teachings on birth control it would have to admit that the encyclical had been in error, and to acknowledge that those who submitted to it did so needlessly. Yet many Catholics were desperate for licit ways to limit their families. In 1951, Pope Pius XII, speaking before a group of Italian midwives, gave his approbation to natural family planning, then often called the rhythm method, in which couples schedule intercourse to try to take advantage of the infertile days in a woman’s menstrual cycle. It was a departure from previous doctrine, since it sanctioned nonprocreative sex. Still, couples often found natural family planning unreliable and anxiety provoking. And if it was acceptable to try to separate sex from reproduction, what sense did the ban on contraception make? John Rock, a Catholic Harvard Medical School professor who’d helped develop the birth control pill, argued that hormonal contraception should be acceptable to the church, since it simply mimicked nature in suppressing a woman’s fertility. Some theologians agreed.
⁵⁸

Seeking a way out of this confusion, Pope John set up a secret six-man body, the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family, and Births—often called the papal birth control commission—to examine it. When he died in 1963, the commission was inherited by his successor, Pope Paul VI, who expanded it several times, so that it was eventually composed of seventy-two people, including, in a break from tradition, five women.

Commission members Pat and Patty Crowley, the married presidents of the Christian Family Movement, an international Catholic organization, presented statements from their members, all committed, pious believers. Wrote one father of six, “Rhythm destroys the meaning of the sex act; it turns it from a spontaneous expression of spiritual and physical love into a mere bodily sexual relief; it makes me obsessed with sex throughout the month.” As the commission’s work continued, the Crowleys organized a more extensive survey of their membership, which found widespread dissatisfaction with the rhythm method: Seventy-eight percent said that it had harmed their relationships. “Which is more pleasing to God,” wrote one of their respondents, a mother of ten, “trusting in the miscalculations of rhythm or making a full, generous decision in holiness to have a child? Rhythm leads to self-seeking, promotes excess in infertile times and strain in fertile times. Is contraceptive sex irresponsible when I have already borne ten little responsibilities?”
⁵⁹

The more the members of the commission debated and learned, the more crucial change began to seem, at least to most of them. Worried by the commission’s direction, apparently conservatives in the Vatican hierarchy maneuvered to have the commission members demoted to “advisers” and the commission itself reconstituted as a body of sixteen cardinals and bishops.
⁶⁰
Yet the cardinals and bishops, hearing the same evidence that had convinced the previous commission members, eventually voted nine to three to change the church’s position on contraception, with three abstentions. (One commission member, Karol Wojtyla of Poland—the future John Paul II—didn’t attend the meeting where the vote was taken, out of solidarity with Polish cardinal Stefan Wysynski, who had been denied a travel visa by the Polish government.)
⁶¹

In the summer of 1966, the commission’s majority submitted a report of their conclusions to the Vatican. “The
regulation of conception
appears necessary for many couples who wish to achieve a responsible, open and reasonable parenthood in today’s circumstances,” it said. “If they are to observe and cultivate all the essential values of marriage, married people need decent and human means for the regulation of conception.”
⁶²

Wrote historian Garry Wills, “The commission members left their work convinced that the Pope could no longer uphold a discredited teaching. When the report was leaked to the press, Catholics around the world took heart at the signs of change.”
⁶³

In the end, of course, there was no change. Conservatives in the Vatican argued that the grandeur of church authority would be undermined if it admitted a previous error. One priest, wrote Wills, “said that if the church reversed itself now, it would prove that the Holy Spirit had been with the Anglicans at Lambeth, not with the Pope in Rome.”
⁶⁴
A Spanish Jesuit had exclaimed during the birth control commission’s deliberations, “What then with the millions we have sent to hell, if these norms were not valid?”
⁶⁵

Pope Paul feared that any change would make it seem as if the church had imposed unreasonable burdens on its people. “Any attenuation of the law,” he said in an interview, “would have the effect of calling morality into question and showing the fallibility of the Church.... Theology would then become the servant of science. . . . [T]he whole moral edifice would collapse.”
⁶⁶

And so in 1968, ignoring the advice of his commission, Pope Paul issued
Humanae Vitae,
which reiterated the church’s absolute ban on contraception. Around the world there was an unprecedented rebellion among the faithful. “Polls registered an instant noncompliance with the encyclical,” Wills wrote. In a profound break with tradition many bishops told believers that, while they should take the pope’s words seriously, they could follow their own consciences.
⁶⁷

In 1978, when Karol Wojtyla, a zealous supporter of
Humanae Vitae,
became Pope John Paul II, he moved to check such rebellion. McClory, whose book
Turning Point
chronicled the history of the papal birth control commission, wrote that the encyclical was practically “the foundation stone of his papacy.... Full and explicit agreement with
Humanae Vitae
(as well as opposition to women’s ordination) became a prerequisite for anyone nominated to become a bishop.” The church would go on to play a consistently intransigent role on questions of population policy, contraception, and, eventually, HIV prevention worldwide.

Yet in the early and mid-1960s it looked as if the last, most monumental bastion of resistance to birth control was beginning to give way. For supporters of international family planning, everything seemed to be falling into place.

I
n 1965, Reimert Ravenholt, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Washington medical school, became convinced that there was a link between smoking and cancer, and he threw himself into researching it. His superiors were not encouraging. He was accused of overstepping his expertise; the head of one department, convinced that all cancers were caused by viruses, objected to Ravenholt presenting a paper arguing otherwise. Frustrated, Ravenholt complained to a friend that the university was stifling him. His friend, who worked at USAID, suggested that he try something new. Ravenholt, he said, should come to Washington, D.C., to head a new program on global population and family planning.

Ravenholt accepted, and as soon as he arrived in the capital he decided he’d made an enormous mistake. “President Lyndon Johnson was speaking loudly, [giving] very powerful messages about the importance of the world population explosion and doing something about it,” he recalled. “In my naïveté, I expected I would have the resources to run a meaningful program.” Instead, he was given a fifteen-square-foot office in the State Department, no staff except for a secretary, and no money. “With that I was supposed to drop the birthrate of the world,” he said.
⁶⁸

That year the Vietnam War would increasingly consume the president’s energy and political capital. The Johnson administration’s will to act on population and risk antagonizing faithful Catholics, a loyal block of Democratic voters, vanished. Ravenholt was tempted to turn around and go home. “But my pride wouldn’t let me just admit that—tell everybody and immediately say goodbye,” he said. “In penance to myself I decided to stay and work a year. Teach me to be more careful in the future.”
⁶⁹

Eventually, though, Ravenholt was able to assemble a small staff. And he found an important friend in William Draper, who had recently retired from a job as chairman of New York’s Combustion Engineering to devote himself fully to fighting overpopulation. In 1965, when Hugh Moore founded the Population Crisis Committee, Draper became its chairman, a job he performed without pay. Draper made it his mission to get Ravenholt the resources he needed, and by 1968 he’d convinced Arkansas senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to earmark $35 million for population programs within USAID. That increased to $50 million in 1969, and by 1972 it would be $125 million.

“So, by the beginning of ’68 we had the policy we needed,” said Ravenholt. “We had, not many people, but we had enough to get going with, and we had enough money to get going, so we could really, finally, seriously move toward making a program.”
⁷⁰

F
rom the start Ravenholt was a polarizing presence. He’s a giant man, well over six feet, with broad shoulders and wild hair that stands up from his head, adding another few inches. He has small, merry blue eyes and a mischievous smile, though when challenged at work he could become enraged and even physically intimidating. Now in his eighties, his sun-drenched house on Seattle’s Lake Washington is packed with books, including many volumes on Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Despite his long-standing interest in history, though, he operates with a scientist’s single-minded empiricism, unwilling or perhaps unable to make concessions to political sensitivities or bureaucratic processes. He’s compulsively flirtatious and likes to shock. Photos from his time at USAID show him with long sideburns, looking very much the 1970s libertine that, by all accounts, he was.

Ravenholt was born on a Wisconsin dairy farm in 1925, the middle of nine children. The grandson of Danish immigrants, he was raised in a Danish-speaking community. His family had neither running water nor electricity. “It was almost as though we were born in the nineteenth or even eighteenth century,” he said.
⁷¹

Rejected from the army because of a heart murmur, he worked his way through the University of Minnesota, finishing in three years and getting accepted to medical school. After graduation he got an internship at the U.S. Public Health Service hospital in San Francisco, and from there joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC. He ended up tracking diphtheria in Appalachia, where he encountered conditions not unlike those he’d later see in the third world. The memory of one poor household stayed with him. The mother was nursing her ninth child and the father was sprawled on a couch watching a large TV, their only real possession. Everyone in the family had roundworm disease; the father had vomited up a footlong parasite.

The source of their troubles quickly became clear: They got their water from an indolent spring located between the house and the outhouse. “These experiences really shifted my gears from reparative medicine to preventive medicine,” Ravenholt said. “I became immediately fascinated and challenged by how we could interrupt the development of these diseases, especially when one can apply some inexpensive, mass approaches like immunization and improved potability of water and so forth.”
⁷²

Ravenholt went on to direct immunization programs in Seattle, “making immunizations so readily available that almost all children got immunized,” he said.
⁷³
Similarly, he said, with family planning, “as a public health physician, I knew to my core that the overpowering determinant was sheer availability.” He would fight overpopulation the way he’d fought disease. What the developing world needed were massive amounts of contraceptives—free supplies of pills, which had only come on the market in 1960, and all the condoms people could use.