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Jesuit Father Michael Kelly is a media professional with 40 years of experience in writing and reporting, editing and publishing, TV and broadcast radio production in Asia and Australia. For 10 years he led Asia’s leading Church media organization - UCA News. Currently, he is the English language publisher of the respected Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica.
Jesuit Father Michael Kelly

World

The Zika-contraception conundrum

The virus is a real-life challenge to the medical world and to how people lead their lives

Published: February 26, 2016 04:03 AM GMT

The Zika-contraception conundrum

The mosquito-borne Zika virus has presented the church with a theological and moral conundrum on how best to contain the virus. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Pope Francis' concession that there is a justification for the use of contraception to meet the challenges that the Zika pandemic presents was common sense in the view of many including the leader of the Philippine bishops' conference.

The pope said contraception was the "lesser of two evils," since the prevention of deformed births was preferred as a solution to abortion of possibly deformed babies in the womb.

"Once more, the pope has shown his sensitivity to complex human situations and allowed the world to see the merciful face of the church," said Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan, president of the Philippine bishops' conference.

Pope Francis has remained "the faithful steward of the message of the Gospel," Archbishop Villegas said in a Feb. 21 statement.

This is a major departure for the leaders of that local church where Catholics are an overwhelming majority and the bishops have waged a strong campaign against family planning policies that made contraception available in the country as proposed by the national government.

In popular assessment, the pragmatic solution makes common sense. But it also entails major problems for Catholic moral teaching on something — contraception — that is deemed to be "intrinsically evil" and absolutely forbidden.

The Zika virus is a real threat. While much more needs to be known about the mosquito-borne disease, Zika is carried by the same daytime biting mosquitoes that also spread yellow fever and the often vicious, and fatal, dengue.

Once thought benign — its low-level physical effects of rashes only affect about 20 percent of those infected — very little research has been carried out until recently.

Over the past year, in Brazil and other Latin American countries, the disease has been linked to an alarming spike in incidences of microcephaly, which causes infants to form with small heads and impaired cognition. This can also increase chances of miscarriage and early death. Scientists in Brazil revealed on Feb. 21 they had mapped the Zika genome and confirmed the links.

The numbers are mounting fast. The Brazilian Ministry of Health estimated that country's number of infected by the Zika virus to be as high as 1.5 million but it has ceased to count the cases of the Zika virus, according to the World Health Organization.

In neighboring Colombia, there are 6,356 pregnant women with Zika among the 37,011 confirmed to be suffering from the virus, according to the Colombia's National Institute of Health.

"The level of concern is high, as is the level of uncertainty," Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization said. "We need to get some answers quickly."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed there are now 27 countries or territories in the Americas with active transmission of the Zika virus.

So the medical challenges are considerable. And the meaning and moral significance of the challenge in many mostly Catholic countries are confronting.

The concession made by Pope Francis and the support for his approach by the Filipino bishops are welcome. The papal concession underlines the conflicts and contradictions in Catholic approaches to issues of birth, conception and its prevention.

Unfortunately and for too long, Catholic views have been trapped in a framework of interpretation that doesn't stand up to scrutiny when faced with the question of what to do when faced with a challenge of the lethal and global proportions that the Zika virus presents.

Catholic moral theology focuses on "acts" alone and fails to accommodate the other factors that have to be part of a considered approach to moral decision making. The act — in this case contraception — is only one of five factors to be considered. 

The assessment of a moral act needs to consider the intention of the person performing the act — what is the intended purpose of the action. It also needs to take into account the motivation (which is different from the intention) of the actor. Then there is the requirement that some consideration is given — not determinative but significant all the same — to the context of the action and all the factors that come into consideration.

Then there is the assessment of the consequences of the action and whether they are in proportion to what is intended. For example, does bombing actually deliver a speedier result than just fighting a war at a considerable loss of life?

Finally, there is the act itself that has its own ambiguity. For example, killing someone in self-defense is a world away from killing someone in a premeditated murder. The act itself does not reveal all we need to know about its moral significance. 

Back to Zika and contraception. The virus is a real-life challenge to the medical world and to how people lead their lives. It is also a practical challenge to the church. Viewed in the context of church teaching since Humanae Vitae in 1968, the concession made by the pope and supported by the leader of the Filipino bishops is actually pragmatic and borders on being what Catholic moral theology loathes and despises — utilitarianism.

The church can't say an act is "intrinsically evil" and absolutely forbidden, and yet be permissible under certain circumstances. That's just not intellectually coherent.

This health crisis confronts the church with the need to revisit its own moral framework, presuppositions and consequent prescriptions. The alternative is for the church to offer no coherent assistance to people facing life threatening moral dilemmas.

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