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My wife and I were having a conversation as we lay in bed last night. She was lamenting that many in our culture don't see the horrendous nature of abortion and can't understand how they got that way. As is my habit, I began to think and try to understand the cause of an idea. I don't think I'm coming up with any new idea, in fact I think this one is a rather Catholic idea and argument that has existed since contraception existed. That is to say, the mass availability of contraception is the root cause of our culture's eventual demand for abortion.

This is how it works. Expectation is one of the largest components of culture that determines not only how we behave in many circumstances, but also how we feel about events. When I expect a driver to use their blinker to signal they are going to turn and they don't, I am upset. Is there something inherently morally repugnant about not using your turn signal? No, but because of social norms and expectations I get upset because someone is outside of that norm. Yet, when I go to Papua New Guinea, blinkers are not used nearly as often and even less for the same purpose, so when it doesn't happen I don't get upset, because I wasn't expecting it.

So how does this play into the contraception and abortion relationship? Well, it changes our expectations. Never before in human history was it possible for people to so easily control whether a woman became pregnant as a result of sex. It wasn't impossible, but it was prohibitively difficult. The story of Judah and his sons is one example where one of his sons had sex with his daughter-in-law with the expectation of raising a child to inherit his brother's property. He spilled his semen on the ground, and as a result God punished him for his faithlessness to his duty. But the method he used is far from reliable. Now we have medication women can use to prevent pregnancy with a much higher rate of success(but still not 100%). And that changes individual and societal expectations about pregnancy. It means pregnancy is no longer a directly correlated expectation to sex. For all of human history sex = pregnancy until recently where sex and pregnancy can be disassociated.

So now we have a problem. If sex doesn't equate to pregnancy any longer and people don't expect it, people are going to be upset when they DO get pregnant but they didn't want to. Previously whether you want to be pregnant or not wasn't even a question. Now, whether you WANT to be pregnant or not determines your reaction to pregnancy instead of the expectation that if you have sex you will likely become pregnant. Regardless of the circumstances of the sexual act, whether consensual, under the influence, or coercive, people's reactions to pregnancy are going to be determined by their expectations and now that they're not expecting to be pregnant, they will be upset if they become pregnant. To be clear, when I say become pregnant, I'm not just speaking about the women, but the men who are involved as well as they have the same emotional reactions based on this social dynamic as the women, if not more so.

So now we have a new situation. Never before did we see so many in our society that had a deep emotional negative reaction to a natural process of procreation because our expectations had changed. Women and men alike feel wronged that a pregnancy they didn't want was "foisted" upon them. In truth in the vast majority of cases it isn't, but that isn't the point, the point is what they expected diverging from reality. Anytime we feel wronged AND we have an expectation that something can be done to resolve the situation, we will act to resolve the situation. If there is no expectation of resolution, people won't even try, so both are necessary. Yet we definitely live in a culture that people feel wronged by the situation, and this feeling comes from a changed expectation and view of pregnancy.

In comes abortion, just like contraception, it is viewed as a miracle to free us from the expectations of our former selves. The expectation of sex was pregnancy, but contraception changed that expectation. The expectation of pregnancy, thus the very common phrase "She's expecting," is the birth of a child. Abortion is the attempt by those who have changed expectations of sex and pregnancy to further change the expectations of pregnancy to escape the emotion of being wronged. People place the feeling of being wronged in different places like men(in the case of the woman), women(in the case of the man), God, society, government, and even the children themselves. It doesn't matter to them whether it is accurate, they feel wronged and it has to be somebody's fault. The only escape they can see from this feeling is abortion. They think if they can just undo the natural consequences of sex and pregnancy that will somehow undo the damage to their minds, hearts, and expectations not fully understanding why they even expected things to go a certain way in the first place.

This is why I think on a societal level mass availability of contraception leads to a natural consequence, because of human nature, of abortion. The idea of contraception itself I do not think is either good or bad in principle. I think it is possible for a couple to use contraceptives without falling into this trap of fundamentally altering their expectations and understanding of reality and procreation. I just don't think it is the norm, or even all that common. I don't know how to correct people's bad expectations in society other than on an individual basis to tell them why they have those expectations and to point out their errors. And I guess for anyone who happens to read this, you've been told.

Jason