It is well known that the Catholic Church condemns contraception as a gravely immoral intrinsically evil act, never to be freely chosen under any circumstances. Unfortunately the very good reasons why the church so teaches are not well known — but this is not the place to give them. All Catholics who accept, as they ought, the teaching of the church, know this. But some priests and theologians loyal to the church disagree over the question raised here. Some say that if one spouse insists on contracepting, the wife’s cooperation in contraception is acceptable; others compare the contracepting spouse to a rapist and argue that the spouse being violated has a right to defend herself by using a contraceptive from the consequences of rape; still others say that contraception is always wrong and that the analogy between the contracepting spouse and the rapist is not good. I will present these three views, reject the first two, and show why I think the third is correct and fully in harmony with magisterial teaching. Can you ‘cooperate’ “Cooperating” with a spouse who insists on contracepting is acceptable under certain conditions — this is the position of some writers. Thus, for example, one well-intentioned person with deep sympathy for a wife whose husband insisted on contracepting thought that she could, under protest, “cooperate” with her husband’s sinful act because doing so was justified in view of the “larger good of the family” because this would keep the marriage together and the husband faithful. There are two serious problems with this approach. Persons holding it speak first of the wife’s “cooperation” in her husband’s act of contraception — and they must be thinking of “material” and not “formal” cooperation because if anyone formally cooperates in another’s sin he also commits that sin, but the kind of cooperation they are considering is not identified. Even more fallacious in my judgment is the “argument” to justify this “cooperation” (the “larger good of the family” argument) is, I fear, the same as the argument from “totality” given by the Majority Report of the Papal Commission on birth regulation formed to “advise” Pope Paul VI on the issue of contraception. The Majority Report, leaked to the press in 1967 to put pressure on him to change church teaching, claimed that the teaching of the church against contraception was wrong and should be changed (A “Minority” Report affirmed the church’s teaching). Paul VI himself rejected the “totality” argument, as reading Humanae Vitae, Nos. 2 through 6, shows. This argument, in fact, is based on the “consequentialistproportionalist” moral theory John Paul II repudiated as incompatible with Catholic teaching in Veritatis Splendor. ‘Flawed’ argument If a contracepting husband makes his unwilling wife submit to sex he is raping her and she has the right to protect herself from the consequences of rape by using a contraceptive — this is the position of Father Edward Bayer, first presented in a doctoral thesis in moral theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome and afterwards published as “Rape Within Marriage.” I agree with Bayer that if a woman is in a position where it is morally certain that she will be raped she can use a contraceptive as the chosen means to prevent the rapist from further violating her. In this case, she is not engaging in an act of contraception because she is not proposing to impede the beginning of new human life while choosing freely to engage in genital sex; she is rather proposing to prevent further violation of her bodily integrity; she is not obliged to let herself become pregnant. This is not, however, the place to give all the reasons why a woman in this situation is not contracepting. The flaw in Bayer’s argument is that we cannot rightly consider a husband who sexually abuses his wife a rapist. With Germain Grisez (see his “Difficult Moral Problems,” Question 28), I agree that a husband who insists on intercourse against his wife’s reasonable will does her a grave injustice (Pope Paul himself said this in Humanae Vitae, No. 13). But it is wrong to speak of rape in marriage when a wife submits to her husband’s act of forcing himself on her against her reasonable will. In rape, the woman who is the victim neither initiated the act nor consents to it and she does what she can to avoid being raped; if resistance is impossible or too risky she must remain passive as far as possible. The wife’s behavior in our case differs because she yields to her husband’s demands and consents, reluctantly to be sure, to her husband’s unjust demands. In addition, such forced, but consented to, intercourse is usually not something that occurs only once or twice but is a common occurrence and known to be so. The wife’s behavior is coerced, but she nonetheless consents to the behavior. This is not true of the victim of rape. Naturally, we can all sympathize with a wife who suffers this, and we surely cannot judge her, but we can say that what she is doing, however reluctantly, is something she chooses to do — just as the Catholic put under coercion and force to deny his faith may reluctantly consent with the intention of repenting later. Explaining why Since contraception is always wrong, a wife can neither contracept nor cooperate with her husband in our case — I have already shown why the first attempt to justify the wife’s cooperation in her husband’s act of contraception fails and why the husband in our case cannot be considered a rapist or his wife as a rape victim in criticizing Bayer’s position. Why do many theologians judge that contraception is always wrong and that a wife’s “cooperation” with her husband’s act of contraception or her own choice to contracept is immoral and why is this view fully in harmony with magisterial teaching? I will now try to show why. In speaking of genital acts between men and women the church always refers to them as acts “proper and exclusive to spouses,” that is, marital or conjugal acts. The marital act is definitely not an act that occurs between a man and a woman who “happen to be married.” Acts forced by one spouse on the other against his or her reasonable will are not marital acts but rather violate the marriage; canon lawyers today agree that such an act cannot be regarded as marital act and would not “consummate” a marriage. The marital act is one that partakes in the marriage itself and the goods of marriage as love-giving, life-giving, grace-giving, the kind of act that not only signifies but participates in and makes real here and now the love-giving, life-giving, grace-giving union of Christ the bridegroom with his bride the church. In and through the marital act husband and wife come to “know” each other in a unique and unforgettable way. Pope John Paul II deepens this truth regarding the “knowledge” of each other that husbands and wives experience when they engage in the conjugal act. In this act, first of all, “together they become almost the one subject of that act and that experience, while remaining, in this unity, two really different subjects.” Second, in and through this act “they reveal themselves to each other, with that specific depth of their own human self. Precisely this self is revealed also by means of their sex, their masculinity and femininity. Then in a unique way the woman ‘is given’ to the man to be known, and he to her. … The reality of the conjugal union, in which the man and the woman become one flesh, contains in itself a new and, in a way, definitive discovery of the meaning of the human body in its masculinity and femininity” (“Analysis of Knowledge and of Procreation,” General Audience of March 5, 1980, one of his catecheses on the theology of the body). The conjugal act is thus “open” to the “goods” or “blessings” of marriage. It is the kind or type of act in and through which conjugal love can be fittingly expressed (its “unitive” meaning) and is the kind or sort of act in and through which new human life can be given and received (its “procreative” meaning). One of the principal reasons why God in creating man, male and female, also created marriage is that he willed that new human life come to be in and through the conjugal act and not through the random acts of fornicators or adulterers. Husbands and wives, by giving themselves to one another irrevocably in marriage, have made themselves “fit” (as Paul VI says in the Latin or official text of HV, No. 2) to do what spouses are supposed to do, and one of these things is to welcome life lovingly, nourish it humanely, and educate it in the love and service of God and neighbor. By giving themselves to one another in the conjugal act, husband and wife open themselves up to the gift of new human life; they submit themselves to the blessing of fertility. As Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them” (Lk 18:16).