When Catholics declare that "The authorities at Rome have again and
again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral and
forbidden," they do so upon the assumption that morality consists in
conforming to laws laid down and enforced by external authority, in
submission to decrees and dicta imposed from without. In this case, they
decide in a wholesale manner the conduct of millions, demanding of
them not the intelligent exercise of their own individual judgment and
discrimination, but unquestioning submission and conformity to dogma.
The Church thus takes the place of all-powerful parents, and demands
of its children merely that they should obey. In my belief such a
philosophy hampers the development of individual intelligence. Morality
then becomes a more or less successful attempt to conform to a code,
instead of an attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear upon the
solution of each individual human problem.

But, we read on, Birth Control methods are not merely contrary to "moral
law," but forbidden because they are "unnatural," being "the perversion
of a natural function." This, of course, is the weakest link in the
whole chain. Yet "there is no question of the lawfulness of birth
restriction through abstinence"--as though abstinence itself were not
unnatural! For more than a thousand years the Church was occupied with
the problem of imposing abstinence on its priesthood, its most educated
and trained body of men, educated to look upon asceticism as the finest
ideal; it took one thousand years to convince the Catholic priesthood
that abstinence was "natural" or practicable.(3) Nevertheless, there is
still this talk of abstinence, self-control, and self-denial, almost in
the same breath with the condemnation of Birth Control as "unnatural."

If it is our duty to act as "cooperators with the Creator" to bring