1
We spent some
time together one evening
and it was just totally normal.
A college atmosphere, you're gonna drink,
you're gonna have something to smoke.
You know, just totally relaxed,
but then I remember something changed
like between one drink being
handed to me or another.
I felt I couldn't really control
what was going on anymore
and all the lights were
dimmed all of a sudden
and I wasn't in possession
of my actual body.
I couldn't move or feel
very much and I was scared.
But I couldn't stop him and
he just went right along
with what he was expecting
that evening to end up like.
And so, I actually was
just crying and immobile.
It took me for a long time
to realize what happened that night
because I remembered it with so much shame
that I felt ashamed for drinking.
I felt ashamed for smoking.
I felt ashamed for spending
so much time with that guy
and shouldn't I have known
that he was interested
and shouldn't I have known
it would go that direction
and shouldn't I, I just
felt so much shame.
And then, of course, I
felt ashamed for cheating
on this boyfriend who was
probably cheating on me too.
I mean, I basically felt
so much shame, though,
that I didn't tell anybody
or really look at it clearly
because it was so filled with shame,
but I did know something
was especially wrong
and hurtful about it.
So, I did, in my confused way,
go and confess that.
I confessed cheating on my
boyfriend in the confessional
'cause I felt that something
was really bad here.
I didn't realize at the time
that was really bad here
was that I had been date raped.
It's tough
raising daughters today.
Sure, my girls have opportunities
that my mother and
grandmother simply didn't have
and I'm very grateful for that.
But, overall, I feel like I
spend way too much of my time
trying to protect them
from and prepare them for
a culture that's quite toxic for women.
I mean, have you seen the videos
and Instagram posts and
ads that young women
are fed these days?
It's craziness.
The sexual objectification of
women is, by far, my biggest
concern as a dad.
And it's not just the media.
Do you know one of the main issues
we face as parents in my community?
Our daughters are having to deal with boys
as young as 11 and 12 texting
naked pictures to them
and continually asking
them to do the same.
A new report highlights
the intense pressure
on young women to share
nude photos of themselves.
Researchers at Northwestern University
analyzed nearly 500 stories
on an anti-cyber bullying
and sexting campaigns website.
More than two thirds of
girls aged 12 through 18
said they had been asked
for explicit images.
Researchers say the girls
faced persistent requests,
anger and threats from boys
to send those pictures.
And this is before
they even get into college
where it seems like things get even worse.
As if parents don't
have enough on their minds
sending their kids away to school,
here is a stat that's gonna
send a chill down your spine.
Based on a recent study,
a quarter of female college students
say they were sexually assaulted.
This is a frightening, but very real part
of the hook-up culture.
One stunning
discovery in the report,
misogyny and sexual
harassment appear to be
pervasive among young people.
In this new report,
19% of freshman women
at a large unnamed private
university in upstate New York
say they were the victims
of rape or attempted rape
during their first year of school.
And that certainly doesn't end
when women get out of university.
How many of you have
been sexually harassed
over the course of your career?
Leave your hand up if
it's more than twice.
More than three times.
More than four times.
That's what got me
interested in the history
of the sexual revolution
to begin with actually.
I looked around and asked
how did we get here?
I am sometimes called the
mother of the women's movement.
My book The Feminine Mystique 1963
broke through the image of women
that was absolutely
the only image of women
in those years after World War II.
The image Betty was
reacting against was one
of a supposedly blissful,
domestic, suburban housewife.
As technology advanced
and the economy boomed
in the 1940s and '50s, women
were told that they could find
meaning and joy and happiness
in all the modern conveniences of life
and that they could be
perfectly content baking cookies
and shuttling their kids to school.
According to the magazines
and television commercials,
this was the American dream.
Well, that dream didn't make Betty content
and, after conducting a survey
of some of her Smith College classmates,
she was convinced that
millions of other women
were asking the same question she was.
Betty Friedan called this,
the problem that has no name,
and she believed the
solution was to be found
in professional career work.
She was convinced that
women could be fulfilled
and content and happy, if
they could just get out
of their humdrum homes
and away from menial tasks
such as laundry and changing diapers
into the supposedly exciting
jobs that men were doing.
Friedan had grown up in an unhappy family
in which her father had forced her mother
to leave her career and stay at home.
Although she was still
working as a writer,
Betty herself had given
up becoming a psychologist
for her husband.
She was sure that if
those career ambitions
were unfettered by domestic
duties and spousal expectations,
the problem that had no
name would be solved.
The Feminine Mystique was a huge hit,
but it wasn't the only
sexual revolution book
making big waves in the early '60s.
There was another woman author
who also believed that
contentment and happiness in life
was to be found somewhere
other than where Better Homes
and Gardens was claiming.
Long before Sex
and the City's Carrie Bradshaw,
Helen Gurley Brown wrote
Sex and the Single Girl,
the year 1962, a bestseller
with a radical message at the time,
young women should enjoy work and sex.
Sex and the Single
Girl sold two million copies
in the first three weeks after its release
and was quickly made into a movie
starring Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis.
In it, Helen Gurley
Brown taught single women
many of the same lessons
that Betty Friedan
was teaching married women,
domestic life, was not
all it's cracked up to be
and working hard in a career
would lead to happiness.
But Brown added one
more element to the mix:
Unmarried, promiscuous sex.
She's quoted as saying
good girls go to heaven,
bad girls go everywhere
else and numerously credited
with separating more young
women from their virginity
than anyone else in the world.
Sex is one of the three best things
there are in my opinion.
I don't know what are the other two.
Like Friedan, Helen
Gurley Brown was preaching
a salvation message to
women who had a problem
they couldn't quite put their finger on
and, when she became the
editor of Cosmopolitan,
that became the Bible of her crusade.
The gist of Cosmo was hard work
and sex without the
kids will set you free.
Formally a literary publication,
Brown turned it into a
sex manual for young women
and it quickly became one
of the world's best selling magazines.
Interestingly, Betty
Friedan was not a big fan
of Helen Gurley Brown.
Betty Friedan called Cosmo quite obscene
and quite horrible.
However, when it came to
one piece of technology,
they were completely unified:
The birth control pill.
Now, at first, this seemed
like just a side note to me,
but, as I dug deeper into this topic,
I realized that the pill
was absolutely essential
to achieving their respective goals.
Does the sexual revolution
happen without the pill?
How important is the pill?
Absolutely not, it's absolutely crucial.
I mean, contraception was the fuel
that made the sexual revolution run.
You take birth control
out of the equation
and the sexual revolution
cannot get out of first gate.
The birth control
pill had been approved
by the FDA in 1957,
not as a contraceptive,
but as an aid to menstrual disorders.
However, stopping pregnancy
was a well-known side effect
and, soon, more women than ever
were mysteriously developing
a need to have their cycles
regulated by the drug.
In 1960, it was officially
approved as a contraceptive
and, by 1962, 1.2 million
women were taking it.
By 1963, that number had
ballooned to 2.3 million.
For Friedan and Brown,
the timing was perfect.
After all, if you were going to preach
that freedom and fulfillment
could be found in money
and careers and promiscuous
sex, you had to have some way
to overcome the pregnancy problem.
Women were being fired
for being pregnant.
I was fired for being pregnant in 1969.
Corporate America didn't want
all of these pregnant women
around in their offices.
If you could say, it's okay, boys,
she's gonna be on the pill
then they'll say, oh okay,
well, then she can be just like a man
and I guess we can hire her.
This is why the National
Organization for Women,
which Friedan founded in 1966,
made sure that access to
contraception was included
as part of its Women's
Bill of Rights in 1968.
You can't be liberated
sexually and not have the pill,
you don't get very far.
As for Helen Gurley Brown,
it's no surprise that
someone who called for women
to have sex outside of
marriage as often as possible
would need easily accessible contraception
to make that vision a reality.
That's why she put a
puff piece about the pill
on the top of the cover of
her very first issue of Cosmo
and why positive articles about the pill
have been a staple of Cosmopolitan
for the last 50 years.
The pill finally made
good on the great promise
of separating sex, in
terms of sexual pleasure,
from all of its natural consequences.
This promise had
actually been made
most vocally in the
20th century by a woman
who came before Friedan and Brown,
the founder of Planned
Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
In their embrace of the pill,
Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown
were joining a battle
that had only recently won
big victories, thanks in large part,
to Sanger's tireless efforts.
In many ways, Sanger was a
combination of Freidan and Brown.
She had seen her mother die
young after having 11 children
and was convinced that
contraception would set women free
from the drudgery and
pain of domestic life,
but she was also a big
believer in promiscuous sex.
She cheated on her husbands continually
and didn't think anything of it at all.
She had this wacko notion
that, evolutionarily speaking,
you had these sex juices in your body
that, if you released them all the time,
it actually caused the
genius somehow to effuse
from your pores and transform you.
You read it now and you think, oh my gosh,
crystals would be more
scientific than this,
you know, palm-reading or anything,
but she really believed
that and, of course,
apparently, given how much
time she spent bed-hopping,
she must've considered herself
a genius of high regard.
So, contraception brought
Sanger, Brown and Friedan
together to achieve
a common goal:
The unshackling of women from
motherhood and domestic life.
It also brought them together
against a common enemy.
Today your opposition
stems mainly from where?
From what source?
Well, I think that
the opposition is mainly
from the hierarchy of the
Roman Catholic Church.
At this point,
the Catholic Church
was basically the only institution
speaking out against contraception,
but, as I was surprised to learn,
it hadn't always stood alone.
Up until the first
half of the 20th century,
every Christian denomination
across the board
recognized the immorality
of contraception.
It wasn't until 1930
that the Anglican Church
was the first to open
the door to contraception
breaking an uninterrupted
tradition for 1,930 years.
All the reformers, from
Luther to Calvin and beyond,
recognized the serious immorality
of rendering sexual intercourse sterile.
And finally the
Anglican bishops buckled.
Every 10 years they have
this Lambeth Conference
and they were fully in agreement
with the Catholic Church
until that August of 1930
when, for the first time,
a little crack appeared
in the Christian dam.
And, within 10 years, all
mainline Protestantism
had collapsed as well.
The Catholic Church was the only one
that did not go back on this
historical Christian teaching.
However, it wasn't
just a Christian teaching.
It was actually predicted in 1930
by wise men and women around the globe,
not only by Christians, and
certainly not only by Catholics,
that if contraception
becomes the order of the day,
we will end up redefining
marriage altogether
and society itself will
dramatically change.
Sigmund Freud, of all people,
who we know was no friend
of religion said this,
he said the abandonment of
the reproductive function
is the common feature of all perversions.
Likewise Mahatma
Gandhi also saw,
in as early as the
'30s, that birth control
made beasts out of men.
That it better enabled men to use women
for their own lustful purposes.
Theodore Roosevelt
condemned contraception,
as quote, "the one sin
for which the penalty
"is national death."
T.S. Eliot, the celebrated
writer, described contraception
as an experiment upon civilization
that was bound to fail.
But, by the mid 1960s,
most dissent had vanished
and there was some anticipation
that even the Catholic
Church was going to adjust
with the times.
There had been a commission
that had been set up
by Pope John XXIII to
look into the question
of contraception right around 1960.
There was no sense that the church
was going to reconsider its
teaching on contraception.
It was how would it present this teaching
in a very different
world, but when he died,
and Vatican II started, Pope Paul VI
decided to greatly expand that commission
and, somewhere along the line,
in the course of that commission meeting,
they decided they would
change their mandate
and they would take up the
question whether the church
could and should change its teaching.
Some of the deliberations
of this commission
ended up being leaked to the press
and, by the time it was
announced that the Pope
would release a document
concerning the morality
of contraception in 1968,
it was assumed by many
that he was going to approve it.
Everybody was so excited about something
that would control overpopulation,
help women be more active in the world,
help people control their family size.
They thought, well, we found
the magic potion right here,
the contraceptive pill, but Paul VI,
through very prayerful reflection
through all the evidence,
was a very agonizing time for him.
He issued Humanae Vitae
and said what had been
the constant teaching of the
Church, that God Loves babies.
Sex and babies go together.
Is it okay to mess with that?
Is it okay to break that connection?
Well, Paul VI said, with the
guidance of the Holy Spirit,
no, it's not.
Let's just say it
was not well received.
The dissent just blew up.
Major Catholic publications,
major secular publications,
TIME Magazine, New York
Times, huge headlines.
Humanae Vitae, as an expression
of church teaching goes,
is the most derided, mocked,
ignored, unread saying,
that ever existed.
People may not have
been reading Humanae Vitae,
but they were reading Cosmopolitan,
which was filled with thrilling stories
about the happiness that
the sexual revolution
was bringing women.
Unfortunately, those stories weren't true.
Now, when I was at the
University of Missouri
School of Journalism, we could
choose a magazine to study
and I had chosen Cosmopolitan.
Reading these articles in Cosmo,
I said these are too pat.
These these stories are made up
and, when I got to Cosmo and got on staff,
I found out they were.
So they were too clean?
They were too perfect.
Too perfect.
Helen Gurley Brown had
written a little handout
on writing things and
she even had guidelines
on how to make up an expert.
It's much easier than actually going out
and finding some expert who's quotable
and I remember, one
time, making up an expert
and I just called him a
Los Angeles psychologist.
But, I mean, I'm laughing about it now,
but, of course, it was
a very serious thing
as young women believed these stories
and they were just sex fantasies
and they began to live them.
Give me an example
of the type of story.
Well, the kind of story,
you know this woman, she goes to Paris,
she meets a man on the Champs-Elysees.
She helps him order a pastrami
sandwich at a Jewish deli
and they go back to the
hotel on the left bank.
They fall into bed laughing,
and the next morning,
she knows she's in love.
Well, that woman didn't actually exist.
We presented these stories,
like women were having
these wonderful lives,
and, think about it, you're
out there in Michigan,
you've got three kids.
The baby just threw up on your shoulder
and this just sounds so wonderful
that these women are
living these exciting lives
and women divorced their
husbands over these things.
Fueled by this media campaign,
the sexual revolution picked up steam
and it certainly did result in more women
attending college and making money.
In the early 1960s, just 7% of women
completed four-year degrees
and less than 10% of students
in medical and law schools were women.
Today, more than one in
three get four-year degrees
and women make up more than half
of college students in the country.
They also earn half of all law degrees
and half of all medical degrees.
However, this doesn't seem
to have had the effect
that was intended.
The feminist movement in this
country promised women once
that they could have it all,
a successful career, financial
success and a family,
but now, a controversial new study
by the University of Pennsylvania,
suggests that women
are less happy than men
despite all of the progress
that women have made
since the 1970s.
We're back on this
Monday with Today's Woman
and some upsetting statistics
when it comes to us
ladies and our happiness.
Yes, according to one government study,
women are less happy than
they were 40 years ago.
Despite a movement
that brought so much
progress to American women,
their happiness has
dropped relative to men
over the last three decades.
You know, I'm actually
quite surprised by this report
because opportunities,
career opportunities,
are very extensive and I
actually don't know why
that would turn up and I think why
is the actual critical
issue in this whole point,
if you're coming up with
a result that surprising.
It's absolutely
surprising and we're gonna,
we'll find out why.
By golly!
The American Psychological
Association has released
the results from its annual
Stress in America survey.
So, here's who's the most
stressed out in America,
women, women and millennials.
Bloomberg created a profile
of the most stressed
out person in America.
She's a woman in her
late 20s or early 30s,
taking her young son to school on the bus.
After she drops him off, she
might sneak a quick cigarette
before heading to a job that
pays less than $50,000 a year.
Just another young parent trying to juggle
work and family, money and bills.
Even millennials without
kids are stressed, though.
A record number of them
may have college degrees,
but this has come at the cost
of huge student loan debt
and a bloated job market.
That's one reason a record
number of millennials
are living back with their parents.
Speaking of parents of millennials,
having their grown up kids at home
is only one of many issues
causing them stress.
According to
the Gallup Healthways
Well-Being Index, middle
aged American women
have the lowest wellbeing
of any age, group or sex,
and this is why.
Let's go, let's
go, let's go, come on.
Debbie gets up with the sun.
Her kids still live at home,
she works a full-time job,
takes her lunch break to visit her mom
who recently suffered a stroke
and is trying to balance her marriage,
all while attempting to stay healthy.
Okay.
Yeah, those days I want to find a corner
and curl myself up and get away
from everybody and everything.
But the stress of
trying to have it all
wasn't the only negative consequence
of the sexual revolution.
It also had a very distinct effect
on relationships and family life.
Interestingly, many of these developments
had been explicitly foreseen
by Pope Paul VI and others.
It was predicted, in
fact, that we will see
an increase in adultery, an
increase in premarital sex,
an increase in divorce, an
increase in fatherless children,
and that would lead to an
increase in crime, drugs, poverty,
so many of the social ills
we're experiencing today
that we just kind of take for granted
as part of the world.
Now, hold on.
Can all of that be traced
back to contraception?
Well, it's more complex than this,
but let me show you the inner logic,
and the inner logic is really undeniable.
Human beings are often tempted
to do things we shouldn't do.
This is part of our fallen nature, right.
We need deterrents.
For example, what would
happen to crime rates
in your community if there were
no such thing as jail terms?
Well, they would go up.
Apply that same logic
to our sexual behavior.
The temptation to commit
adultery has always been there.
Adultery is nothing new.
But take away the main deterrent
from committing adultery,
which is the fear of
an unwanted pregnancy,
and what's going to happen
to rates of adultery
in a given society, they're gonna go up.
What's one of the main causes of divorce?
Adultery.
The sexual revolution
certainly did lead
to an increased divorce rate,
but, for decades, the message has been
that this really isn't a
bad thing because women
are better off and kids are resilient.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
runs an organization
called the Ruth Institute
which is dedicated
to helping victims of
the sexual revolution.
According to her, divorce
has actually been a disaster
and women and children have
been particularly hard hit.
My husband and I experienced
four-and-a-half year infertility crisis
and we resolved that crisis
by adopting a little boy
from a Romanian orphanage.
He arrived in April,
two and a half years old
and then our daughter was
born six months later,
but those two kids showed us
very clearly, very clearly,
children need their parents
and children are not potted plants
that you can put on a shelf
and water them once in a while
and they'll be fine.
That is just not true.
So much goes on in the first
18 months of a child's life
and we saw that with our little
boy by what he had missed
and how difficult it was
to make up all the things
that he had missed.
He's doing fine now, thanks be to God,
but it was scary.
It was a very scary time,
but that's what convinced me
that children need their parents
and you will never talk me out of that.
I don't care what slick ad
campaign anybody comes up with
or what kind of propaganda
comes down the pike
saying that kids are resilient.
Blech!
Kids are not that resilient.
Kids need their own parents.
And so, that was the turning point for me.
Leila Miller started
chronicling the effects
of divorce almost by accident.
She noticed some sadness
in one of her friends
that seemed to be related
to her parents' divorce
and she was curious about it.
So, she put out a
questionnaire on Facebook
asking for feedback from now
adult children of divorce.
I got probably, in the first two days,
I got about 100 people.
I got what I consider to
be an avalanche of pain.
You can't even imagine
what the children of divorce go through.
They all had so many of these issues
and they can point to,
especially now as adults,
'cause maybe at the time
they didn't even understand
why am I full of such self-loathing?
Why am I so insecure?
Why am I looking for love
in all the wrong places?
Why am I acting out violently?
And then they realize, as they grow up,
my whole identity, even who I am,
everything I knew about
my life, was blown apart.
I had no say in it
whatsoever and I was expected
to go along with it and think it's good.
And no one, not even
counselors, no one asked me
about how I felt about it or
whether I had some thoughts
that weren't so pleasant
about what just happened to my life.
Here's one I hear all the time.
Your parents get divorced
then they get remarried.
So, you're going from
one house to the other,
but your remarried parent over there,
they have a child together,
and that child doesn't
have to go any place.
That child gets to be with
their mom and dad all the time,
but you are going back
and forth from mom and dad
and, when you go to your dad's house,
there are pictures of dad and
his wife and their children
and their whole extended
family on both sides.
All of that's on the wall, but
there are no pictures of you
with you and your mom and dad
or your mom's side of the family.
None of that is over there.
It's like half of your
family doesn't exist
half of the time.
So, having two half-homes is not the same
as having one home.
Themes of isolation,
themes of abandonment,
a lot of these people go
on to their own marriages
in stark terror of either being abandoned
or abandoning and leaving
their own marriage
because they never had
a model of how to stay.
And so, you get some of the participants
who are explaining how they would plan,
even though they had a wonderful spouse,
that they would plan for that day that,
either they would have to leave
or that the spouse would up and run
and yet there was nothing
wrong with their marriage.
It never, ever ends for
the children of divorce.
It shows up at holidays.
It shows up at weddings.
It shows up at graduations.
Who's supposed to have the seat of honor?
Is the new wife really gonna come?
Do we have to put up with the stepdad?
It goes on and on and on.
The idea that kids get over
it, it's just not true.
It wasn't until one of their parents
actually physically died
where they felt it's over
and this could be decades,
decades after the divorce
and others said, almost
identically some of them,
when their one parent would
die and then they said,
oh, I guess my parents
aren't getting back together.
The message that the kids
get is that love can stop,
that love, even though it was
supposed to go on forever,
ends when you're not happy
anymore with the person.
So, that sets them up for
a life of thinking, okay,
I'm only lovable until I'm not,
you know, and then what happens?
Kids aren't the only ones
adversely affected by divorce.
Women suffer as well.
Studies show that women
who have been divorced
have much higher financial, emotional
and psychological stress than
their married counterparts.
Part of this is simply the
extra workload they take on.
A new report today confirmed
what millions of us already know,
that the powerhouse
driving so many families
are moms who work outside the home.
They're the primary breadwinners
in a whopping 40% of families,
nearly four times the number in 1960.
And, of those women,
63% are single mothers
with a median income of only $23,000.
There are 10 million
single-mother-led families in the U.S.
which is triple the number in 1960.
If it were not that
divorce touched on sex,
as Peter Graves has said,
it would not be allowed
in the society, something
that is that detrimental
to the foundations of society.
And yet, because it's about sex,
because marriage is about
sex, divorce is about sex,
we allow it.
We allow it and we affirm it.
What happens in a given culture
when there are huge increases in adultery,
huge increases in premarital sex,
and these men and women
have already determined,
by the choice of using contraception,
that they don't want this
act to result in a child,
but then the contraception fails.
We know there's no 100%
effective method of contraception
so we're gonna have huge increases
in so-called unwanted pregnancies.
What's the next demand?
What happens next?
There's a demand for abortion
as a way to back up failed contraception.
It's not surprising
that Betty Friedan founded
the National Association for
the Repeal of Abortion Laws
in 1969 and, Margaret
Sanger's Planned Parenthood,
became the country's leading advocate
and provider of the procedure.
The Supreme Court
actually acknowledged this
in its 1992 case, Planned
Parenthood versus Casey.
It said, for many years now,
people have been making
decisions that define themselves
and their place in society
based on the availability
of abortion in the event that
contraception should fail.
I read in the Guttmacher Institute,
Planned Parenthood's research arm,
this is coming from Planned Parenthood,
I found this amazing stat that a woman
taking a contraceptive with
a 98% effectiveness rate
has a 70% chance of experiencing
an unexpected pregnancy,
if she uses that contraceptive
method over 10 years
and this is what I saw as a young woman.
I saw so many women who
were college-educated,
intelligent, responsible young women,
they were following everything
society told them to do.
They were being responsible sexually
and then something goes wrong,
something didn't work out.
They end up with a positive pregnancy test
and they felt like they had no choice.
I have known many women who
ended up in abortion clinics,
not one of them ever felt
like she really had a choice.
Once the feminists started pushing
for abortion and contraception,
I just naturally thought
those were good for women.
So, I got pregnant the
third time by surprise.
I had been so unhappy on that pill
that I didn't want to go back on it,
but we had two children.
We'd just had a second and we
didn't have a lot of money.
So, I went back to a doctor and I said,
I don't like this pill
it makes me depressed.
He says, oh, aren't things
going wrong in your life?
It can't be the pill
and so he gave me the,
I was so mad at him, but
I took the prescription
and walked out the door.
But he didn't bother to tell
me that you have to take
that pill for a month
before it's effective
and I was pregnant within a month,
on that pill again.
And, so this time, we were in a panic
because we didn't have much money.
Our books were not selling that well.
We had two children and, at this point,
we decided we had to have an abortion.
And that was the worst
decision of our lives.
What's sort of crazy about this
is that while the push to get a career
and have sex without babies causes women
to struggle mightily to keep
their fertility in check
while they advance in
their professional lives,
the exact inverse problem arises
after they have reached a certain age
and decide that now is
the time to have children.
Dr Morris categorizes this group of people
as heartbroken career women.
I came up with that terminology
because that was my story.
The reason my husband and
I had an infertility crisis
is because we waited until
I was 35 to even think
about having children, right.
And why did we do that?
Well, we did that because
my career came first
and my education and so on and so forth.
So, I'm very sensitive about this
and, I did a little bit of calculation,
I mean, once again, this is something
where nobody asks the right questions,
but I estimate that there
are probably 500,000 women
in the United States with advanced degrees
who have some kind of impaired fertility.
What's really notable
is that the number of
IVF babies is going up
and the number of babies
being born in general
is going down.
Do we think this is because
people are waiting later?
Do we think this is because
people are having a tougher time
conceiving Au naturel?
What do we think?
You know what
no one knows for sure,
but the waiting longer for giving birth
is probably the best bet.
It's very strange, you sever
sexuality from procreation,
and what happened was that
we're having sexuality
through any means for any end
and procreation by any means for any end.
What was more strange than
people throwing away children
at the same time they're
frantically trying to have them
by any unnatural means?
The result is that
40% of women in America
nearing the end of
their childbearing years
say they have less kids than
they would have preferred.
The reason it's so insidious
is that we've been sold the idea
that, in order to
participate in the economy,
you must follow the same path
that the men have followed.
So, what we did is we took
the higher education system,
we took the economy as
given and we've asked women
to adapt their bodies to the
economy and the university life
and I say that what we
need to do is to take
women's bodies as given
and make the economy
and the university adapt to us.
Although the
university has not changed
in the way that Dr Morse would like,
it certainly is different today
because of the sexual revolution.
Indeed, it can be argued
that campus culture
is the section of society
in which the combined
ideals of Betty Friedan
and Helen Gurley Brown
are on clearest display.
Here, casual sexual encounters have become
the primary currency
of social interaction.
These relationships have
two main characteristics.
They become sexual very quickly,
often before the partners
even know each other at all,
and they don't require commitment
or develop into anything
deep and long-lasting.
Sociologist Mark Regnerus
calls this cheap sex
and argues that both of these developments
are a direct result of wide
acceptance of contraception.
It slowed relationships down.
Men were unwilling to commit.
Women felt pressured to have sex
before they might prefer
to in a relationship.
So, she got to control her fertility.
He got charge of the pace
with which relationships became sexual.
One reason that
there isn't supposed to be
a commitment is that both partners,
but especially the girls,
are supposed to be focused
on getting a career and
establishing themselves financially
and relationships get in the way of that.
Unfortunately, cheap sex
doesn't actually feel cheap
to young women.
She had agreed to be
friends with benefits
with a guy on campus and she thought,
at the beginning of that,
that she could do this.
That she could be friends with this guy,
sleep with him when they felt like it,
and have no emotional attachment to him,
have no emotional repercussions.
And she was confiding in me
that that didn't turn out to be true.
It was very difficult.
She found herself wanting
to be loved by him,
wanting to be pursued by him
and he wasn't going to do it
because the agreement
was we use each other.
You know, mutually beneficial
use and then we move on
when we don't want to do that anymore.
And she realized pretty quickly
that that wasn't good for her.
During those years,
what shaped my idea
of the male-female sexual interaction
was just like men have these desires,
whether or not they tell you
they want to act on them ahead of time,
they will act on them, and
then you go along with it
to not be awkward.
It's not so much that
women have taken control
and can be the aggressor and powerful,
that's actually not the
case in the hookup culture.
No, I feel like it was
sometimes played that way.
It was played that way a
lot in the media that I saw.
Like in Sex And The City,
the women are in control
and they're getting what they want.
Maybe some women are
experiencing different things
than I did, but I definitely didn't have
that experience myself and
I felt like it was always
the male, the male pleasure was the goal.
Hookup culture, female
pleasure, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
Like that didn't happen so much for me.
So, the morning after,
are there any girls on
college campus looking back
at the night before
saying that was awesome.
No, no, I didn't
experience that,
instead, it was often jokes
about that was really awkward
or, oh my gosh, you won't
believe what happened.
Those kind of jokes.
Or we'd come up with
nicknames for the guys
which sounds really silly and demeaning,
but I think it was our way of making light
of just what we were doing.
I had an interesting moment
where I was sitting on my bed
reading this On Human Life encyclical
and I had some women's magazines
spread out in front of me
and I realized that every single one
had the word sexy somewhere on the cover
sometimes more than once.
All of these articles were,
how to please men sexually,
how to be sexy.
The women were dressed and
unbelievably scantily-clad
showing off everything and I thought,
this isn't how my grandmothers dressed.
This isn't how my
great-grandmothers dressed.
This is not how women
have ever been encouraged
to dress in human history
and I had always bought
into these ideas that,
oh, that's because women
were repressed and it
was an anti-woman thing
that women didn't used
to let it all hang out.
And then I thought, you know, as a woman,
I don't think I want to be told
that wearing micro-mini
shorts and a tube top,
is like how I should be dressing.
I wish the standard of style
was frankly a little more forgiving.
I thought this is
actually very anti-woman,
this new image of women
where we all have to have
perfect bodies with not a flaw on them
and wear these fashions where everything
is just hanging out all the time
and I thought when did
this style of dress change?
When did it go from women dressing
in a fashionable but dignified manner
to having to look like
stripper Barbie all the time
and I realized it was right
around when our society
accepted artificial contraception.
And, in Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI
predicted back in the '60s,
he said if we accept
artificial contraception,
men will start to look
at women as objects.
Women will start to feel pressure
to make themselves objects for men
and I looked from that encyclical
to the magazines on my bed
and I realize it happened.
He was right.
Contraception has
readjusted the relationship
between men and women forever.
It's a complete game-changer.
The man can use the
woman as a sexual object.
The woman, thanks to contraception,
becomes a masturbation device
and we see this working itself out
in the mainstreaminization of pornography.
When Humanae Vitae was
released and rejected in 1968,
within 12 months, you had
pubic hair in Playboy magazine
for the first time.
Then you had the rise
of other more gnarly,
more hardcore magazines.
The Hustler, Penthouse,
was the next generation
and then, with the invention of the modem,
you have internet pornography.
You can access the most
horrifying illegal content
with the click of a mouse.
All of it was enabled by
this fundamental refusal
to organically unite children
with sexual experience.
Pornography has
become so pervasive
and is so clearly harmful that
governments around the world
are starting to call it
a public health crisis.
And it's not just the
objectification of women directly
that is a concern.
Porn also hurts women by being
a major cause of divorce.
Indeed, 56% of divorce cases
involve one of the parties
having an obsessive interest
in pornographic websites
and a full 68% involve one party
meeting a new romantic
interest over the Internet.
Porn is also a major
reason why there are fewer
marriable men to begin with.
People are turning into,
quite literally, zombies.
We read about zombies
coming from some weird virus
that aliens give us and,
it's like, there's men
walking around bleary-eyed.
There's not much left
to them but a right arm
and eyes and Internet connections.
And what else do you need for a zombie?
They're dysfunctional.
They're not able to do anything.
They're non-males,
they're almost non-humans.
And while making
men into zombies,
we've gotten rid of women altogether.
I think what is actually happening,
the pill has made women obsolete,
disassociates sexual pleasure
with marriage and procreation
and it's just unleashed,
wherever I can find pleasure.
Well, pretty soon, it doesn't
have to be with a woman.
I had a professor who put it this way
and it really hit me between the eyes,
he said as soon as you sever
orgasm from procreation,
any orifice will do.
In other words, any means to
the sexual pleasure will do.
So, women are now without men
because the men prefer the pornography
and now they're taking
up with the ultimate
objectification of women, literally,
making an object of women called a sexbot.
The move from contraceptive sex
to robotic sex and pornography
is a very easy move
once people see what's going on.
So, we're better off?
This is the great society,
this is the pleasure utopia you promised?
My father left when I was two
and, then growing up, I got
very attached to my grandfather
and he ended up divorcing my grandmother
and leaving her for another woman.
So, when that happened it destroyed me
and I was really young
and, because of that,
I just learned, well, love doesn't last.
It's a temporary thing.
So, when I got to high school,
it just kind of rolled
over into my relationships
and I had my first serious
relationship at about 15
and, after a while, it was just wonderful
and I thought I was in love
and everything was great
and then slowly we got very physical
and I ended up losing my virginity
and it literally just all
went downhill from there.
And I got into the partying.
I got into the drinking and
I got into the clubbing.
You name it, I was into it.
And, in the end, you're
just left empty and broken
and damaged from the world
and after the world says,
oh, it's not that bad.
My friends used to tell
me, oh, it's not bad.
It's not that big of a deal.
And there's one morning where I woke up
just feeling disgusted
from the night before
and I just remember my
friends, that echo of, well,
it's not that bad and it's
not that big of a deal,
just thinking, what's
not that big of a deal?
My body, my self-respect, my dignity?
But I was so far gone
that how do you even recover from that?
When a person is being used, they know it.
They know it in the depths of their being.
They may deny it, they ignore
it and I tried, but I knew it.
And, after a while, you realize
a person's not spending time
with you anymore.
They're just spending time with your body
and, there I was, a healthy 16-year-old
taking birth control and popping pills
and taking Depo-Provera shots
so I wouldn't get pregnant all the while
so I could just be used by people?
It just didn't make sense to me.
One night my mother came to me
because she just didn't know what to do
and she said you're going
to a chastity talk today.
I said, no, I'm not, thank you.
And she says, no, you're going.
I told her I'm not gonna go listen
to some dork talk about sex.
Thanks, but no thanks, it's not happening.
And I thought, oh, I'm gonna lose my car.
So, I thought, oh okay, I'll go.
Let me just go to her talk
and I'll sit in the back for 15 minutes
and I'm out of there.
And I went and I sit in
the back of the church
and the 15 minutes that I
thought I was going to sit there,
God literally changed my life.
That speaker was
sharing insights
based on the teachings of Karol Wojtyla,
the man from Poland
who became pope in 1978
and took the name John Paul II.
They looked at the
teachings of Pope John Paul II
and the Theology of the Body
and how it impacted my life
and it just showed me my
dignity, my value, my worth,
what I was created for, my
sexuality was created for.
It just opened up a whole new world.
It is a world that John
Paul II had been exploring
for decades and which was
very close to his heart.
For the first five
years of his pontificate,
he delivered about 130
Wednesday audiences,
which have now been come to known
as the Theology of the Body.
We identified Theology of the Body
by Saint John Paul the Great
with his Wednesday talks
from 1979 to 1984.
But the foundation was laid
20 years before that in 1960
with the release of then,
Cardinal Wojtyla's book,
Love and Responsibility which
came out, providentially,
the same year that the
first birth control pill
called Enovid was approved by the FDA.
Literally, at the same
time, that this pornography
and birth control pill
were coming through,
the church was looking,
honestly, to find a way
to proclaim to this culture what is good,
what is true and what is beautiful.
And one particular
bishop in Krakow, Poland,
found his own way.
In that book, Love and Responsibility,
which is a difficult
read, it's very dense,
very, very rich and very deep,
he was saying things that
no Catholic poet ever said.
Things like the importance of husbands
giving their wives orgasms.
It was a rare find,
whether among a clergy,
or a rare find even one
in the Catholic world
that spoke so deeply and eloquently
about the meaning of love.
And that became a powerful antidote
to the sexual revolution.
St John Paul II and
and I are very tight.
I love J.P. II so much.
In fact, when I wrote my first sex essay
for The Tampa Bay Times,
I interviewed a couple
and that couple told me you need to read
Love and Responsibility
which was written by J.P II
before he was pope.
And I had never heard of it
and I was like, you know,
I'll look it up.
So, I looked it up and I ordered it
and it came in the mail
and, when I opened it,
the first chapter's on the verb to use
and I read about a page and,
I was like, absolutely not
and I put it back on the
shelf because, I was like,
there's no way I'm gonna get through this.
It took me three years to read
that book and comprehend it.
I would pick it up every now
and then, give it another try.
It was just too heavy, too philosophical.
My brain wasn't ready
for it so I put it back
but, that third year that I had that book,
I picked it up and I must
have read it in about a month.
I finished it on the Fourth of July.
I will never forget and that's when I had
this whole new depth.
This whole new understanding
of the depth of chastity,
this whole new understanding
of what love really is.
It was an understanding
that John Paul II
had developed over many years
of ministering to young
adults before he became Pope.
John Paul II, when he would teach
the university students in Poland,
the women in the class
would be, well, surely
he must have been married
or at least engaged.
Like how could he know us so well?
Well, he knew them well
because he listened well.
There was a woman who is
a human rights activist
who suffered greatly under communism,
I believe also Naziism,
and she really struggled
with understanding faith in God
and wrestled because of
a lot of that suffering
and her friend was able to
arrange an opportunity for her
to have a private meeting
with Pope John Paul II.
And they sat down for a long time together
and then this woman
came out of the meeting
in tears of just joy
and the woman said, well,
what did he say to you?
And she said he's the
most extraordinary man
I have ever met.
And she said, well, why?
And she said he listened to me
and that was the genius of John Paul II.
He knew that what we had
to say was more important
than what he had to say and
he really felt that way.
And so, you have this man
who spent years listening,
with not just his ears, but his heart,
camping with young people on these trips,
young married couples.
And they say it was 50
to 60 young, engaged
and married couples that would
go on these canoeing trips
with him in Poland.
There was a divorce rate of zero percent.
None of them got divorced
and, when you learn
what it is that he was teaching
them in the wilderness,
then it becomes obvious why.
One of the main points
of John Paul II's teaching
was that women were getting a raw deal
from the sexual revolution.
There was one instance
where John Paul II
was addressing a number of bishops
and, after this meeting of the bishops,
one of them, Bishop Darcy of
Indiana, came to him and said,
holy father, there's
one word that struck me
during your address, it's attractive,
like how do we make these
difficult, moral teachings
attractive to the modern world?
And he said John Paul became very serious,
like a philosopher.
He gave a response that Bishop Darcy said
is forever embedded in heart.
He said John Paul said to him,
it is necessary to understand
the soul of the woman.
He said all of these things
that have promised to liberate her,
premarital sex, contraception, abortion,
have they not enslaved her?
But that one power-packed little sentence,
if you want to understand
this whole issue,
you first have to understand
the soul of the woman
and, if you don't get that,
you're not going to get the rest of it.
Somewhat, paradoxically,
in understanding
the soul of a woman, John
Paul II started by affirming
the beauty and dignity
of the woman's body.
What I love about it is
that it's counter-intuitive.
You think, well, if there's
an emphasis on the body
as evil or as sexual excesses,
the solution, you'd think,
would be to focus on the soul
and spirituality and prayer.
It's not what John Paul II did.
He focused on the body and
the goodness of the body
and the body as an integral
part of who we are,
not an instrument, not an
external kind of widget
that I use at my will, but I
am a body, and I am a soul.
And so, it's that integration
that powers the message
of the Theology of the Body.
It was this love of the
body that led John Paul II
to take the loin cloths off the
nudes in the Sistine Chapel.
When Michelangelo originally
painted the Sistine Chapel,
people got pretty upset
about it, in the Vatican,
saying this is like a stew of nudes.
This belongs in a tavern or a brothel,
not a Papal chapel with
all this nakedness.
And so, as soon as Michelangelo died,
because he wouldn't do it in his life,
they had many of them painted over.
They chiseled out Saint Blaise,
his whole head out of it,
and changed the direction of
it so he would be looking away
from St Catherine of
Alexandria who was nude.
And so, they had all these renovations
and John Paul II said, no, no, no, no.
Purity is not about spending
the rest of your life
avoiding the sight of the human body.
Purity is about seeing the glory of God
in and through the human body.
And so, he ordered these
restoration artists
to go through and peel away the years
of the soot and the grime
and to be able to take off
many of these loin cloths
and restore it to its glory.
And, in many senses, that's what he did
to the church's teachings on sexuality,
that many of them had been encrusted
under these countless misunderstandings
and just a confused notion of
what the church really taught.
And he kinda peeled that away
so we could see God's original
design for human sexuality
and all its beauty and all of its glory.
That, for me, has been the real issue,
this issue of what does it
mean to honor the dignity
of a woman.
You know, if I were to say to a woman,
I'll only have sex with
you if you get a nose job.
I'll only have sex with you
if you get breast implants.
Am I loving her or am I treating her
as some object for my pleasure?
Is it any different if I say
I'll only have sex with you
if you sterilize your womb?
Fertility is integral to
who we are as human beings.
I can't say to a woman I love you,
but I don't love your fertility
because fertility is
integral to who she is.
And it amounts to something
like this in the relationship,
the man and the woman
saying to each other,
I really want to have sex with you.
Oh, I mean not the real you,
you know, the altered, manipulated you.
You on the pill.
You wearing a condom.
You this, you that, and
it's not the real you.
A few years back, I gave a
seminar on the Catholic vision
of sex and marriage.
After the seminar, I had a
woman come up to me and say,
I agree with most of what you're saying
except for the part where you
said contraception is evil
and she went on to
explain, she said, you see,
I have a friend and, for her,
contraception saved her marriage.
And then she went on
to tell me this story.
This friend of hers had a few children
and her husband came and said, look,
we've had enough children and,
unless you get on the pill,
I'm going to have to find someone else.
The husband, literally,
said to her I'll replace you
unless you agree to contracept.
The woman, initially,
didn't want to contracept
because she was a Catholic
and wanted to be faithful
but she thought it was
better to contracept
than to be replaced by another woman
and have her husband leave her.
And the woman then went on to explain
that, you see, she saved her marriage
by satisfying her husband's
desire to use contraception
and now they're very happy.
They don't fight over this issue anymore.
It was interesting, if you look
at this from the perspective
of John Paul II's Theology of the Body,
the whole point would be
is that the man did replace
the woman with an altered,
manipulated version of herself.
And the woman allowed
herself to be replaced,
replaced her true self
with her contracepted self
and gave in to her husband's
desires precisely to relate
to someone other than her as she truly is.
So, it's interesting to note
that all the early feminists of the 1800s
recognized contraception
would degrade woman,
would lessen her in the eyes of men.
Somewhere along the line and,
I believe Margaret Sanger is,
probably, largely to blame
here, women bought into an idea
that, rendering their bodies sterile,
was essential to be liberated
and liberation, in this sense,
means to become the kind
of being that can have sex
without getting pregnant.
What kind of being is that?
It's called a man.
A man is the kind of
being who can have sex
without getting pregnant.
A woman is the kind of being
who can have sex and get pregnant.
Is this a bad thing
that needs to be erased
or is this a good thing
that needs to be honored
and respected?
If a woman, to claim
equal dignity to a man,
has to make herself
more and more like a man
to claim that equality, then
isn't she already buying
into the fundamental lie that
she's not equal in dignity
as a woman?
I think a lot of people who attack
the church's teaching on contraception
never really paused to ask themselves
a really important question,
which is what if the woman's
body is already perfectly made?
What if fertility is a gift
and that she doesn't need pills
and drugs and shots
and implants and latex?
What if the woman really
needs is to be understood?
And that, instead of suppressing
her fertility and her body
with these synthetic sex hormones
to conform to our desires,
why don't we conform our
desires to the perfect way
her body has already been created
and isn't this authentic
sexual liberation?
John Paul II also talks
a lot about the language of sex.
He notes that the body
and the way we use it
sends particular messages to others.
The sexual act has a meaning.
It's what one person is
saying with his or her body
to another person.
And what John Paul II says
what the language of the body says
is that I'm willing to be
a parent with you, right.
I've chosen you out of all the people
that I was attracted to,
and that's usually a lot,
but you're the one I
want to be a parent with.
I want my whole life bound up with you.
That's what children do.
They make your life completely bound up
with another person's life.
And so, it's not just
I find you attractive.
It's not just I expect to enjoy
a great physical pleasure with you.
It's that I think you have what it takes
or can get what it takes to be a parent.
I think you're generous.
I think you're kind.
I think you're responsible.
I think you'll make a great
father or great mother.
I want to bring more little
you's into this world.
What a thing to say to another person.
On the other
hand, contracepted sex
says something very different.
Look what contraception has done here.
50 years ago, if a guy said to a girl,
I wanna have sex with you,
she could rightly conclude,
50 years ago, this guy wants to marry me
and father my children
and build a life with me.
What does it mean today?
It means you're hot and I
want an orgasm from you.
Which one is more honoring
of who and what a woman
is and what a man is?
You know, the church is not saying
that you're going too far.
You know, oh, you went all the way.
No, that's not the problem.
The church is the one saying, hey,
we want you to go all the way.
We want you to go, not
too far, but beyond that,
make a total gift of yourself.
It's not a one-night stand or a hookup
or friends with benefits.
This isn't a total gift of self.
It's a lie in the language of the body
because your body is saying,
I am completely yours,
but, in reality, no
total gift of the person
has taken place.
The idea that
there should be a gift
of the total person comes from
John Paul II's definition of love.
A lot of people think
love is strictly a feeling.
And the thought of Bishop Wojtyla,
he recognized love as self-gift.
Love is about willing the
good of the other person.
It's about making sure that
this person's needs are met.
It's about laying down
your life for this person.
Where you're actually wanting to do
what's best for the other.
And when you explain this to
people, they're like, yeah,
yeah, that makes sense.
I know that ache of being alone
and that ache of dissatisfaction
when I've settled for
something less than love.
So, the opposite of
that then is not so much hate,
as we usually think of it, as an emotion.
What's the opposite of love?
So, if love is this self-gift,
willing the good and trusting
ourselves to the other,
he posited that if it's in the will,
then the opposite is to use one another.
So, instead of willing
the good for the other,
we appropriately take from
the other for ourselves
and we don't entrust
ourselves to the other.
But we separate and protect
ourselves from the other.
So, this use and protect is
really the opposite of love
which is self-gift and
trusting ourselves to it.
For John Paul II,
contraception is wrong then
because it kills love.
Contraception changes the
very nature of the sexual act
from loving a person to using a person.
Now, sexual pleasure is
a great gift from God
and we need to rejoice in that gift,
properly understood and lived.
But, as soon as you remove fertility
from the sexual equation,
the goal is no longer starting a family.
The goal is no longer
serving the next generation.
The goal is pleasure.
When pleasure is the goal what
do other human beings become?
They become means for our pleasure.
It's fascinating to me
that we have convinced,
not one, but two, maybe even
three generations of women now,
that our fertility is our enemy,
that our children are our enemy.
That they're something
that need to be taken out
and they get in our way
and they are not gonna help
advance us.
And I think this is really the source
of so much unhappiness in our culture.
This triumph of the
contraceptive mentality
has changed everything
about our view of children.
It's almost like we're living
in, as someone once said,
a post-apocalyptic wasteland
where infertility is the goal.
Much of this comes back to
these twin goals of feminism
which is that we want to work,
we want to make our own money
and we don't want any obstacles to that.
And, secondly, we want to be
empowered in our sex lives
and we don't want obstacles there either.
Look at the language of contraception.
We use a verb to describe our behavior
when we use birth control
and the word is protect.
If it's really cold in northern Alberta,
I need to protect myself
from the frigid air.
I wear a parka or I stay indoors.
If I'm at war, I need the
protection from the enemy
with a bulletproof vest
or a tank or whatever.
But what am I protecting myself against
when I use contraception?
A baby.
The coming to be of a new human person.
We should not be using
the language of protection
to surround and to infiltrate
what is supposed to be
the ultimate experience
of safety and security
and peace and communion.
So, the sexual revolution
has caused the death of
love between the sexes
and the death of love
between mother and child.
This development has been
particularly devastating to women
who, according to John Paul
II, have a unique capacity
for life-nurturing love.
He called this the feminine genius.
By tapping down and denying
this aspect of femininity,
women have left themselves
grasping for purpose.
We find ourselves when
we give ourselves away
and I think this is one of
the keys that we're missing.
We're looking for ourselves
all over the world,
from Paris to Bali, and
we're not finding ourselves
because, of course, it's all this matter
of giving ourselves away.
The most common
response to this is, of course,
what are you saying, women
need to be stuck at home?
That they can't have a career?
That's the interesting
thing is the pendulum.
People think you're either saying women
have to be astronauts and firefighters
or they need to be doormats.
And I think, actually,
we're getting to the point
in the generations where people
are getting tired of this,
like, okay, we know
women can be astronauts.
We know women have these gifts.
We know we have all these abilities.
Can we please get back to the things
that are gonna be released
during our hearts?
And there was an article a few months ago,
women that were very professional,
they were making a lot of money.
They had great jobs but,
at the end of the day,
they said, you know,
I just want to go home
and grow a garden.
I want to quit my job in Bahrain
and I want to go have a family.
I want to go bake bread.
And this was my experience.
One of things that I wanted
to do more than anything
was to make cookies on Saturday
with my niece and nephew.
Of course, they live across the country
and I couldn't do that, but
it was just this simple desire
that I think that we have for doing
something more with ourselves.
Yes, we've gained great opportunities,
but that's not really where hearts are.
By her very nature and being a woman,
God has called all women to motherhood
And it doesn't necessarily
mean biological motherhood.
It could be spiritual motherhood
or emotional motherhood in different ways,
but it's a gift that's
distinct to the female sex.
I think women have
this capacity to nurture.
This is the kind of woman that,
when you leave her presence,
you know yourself better.
You know something about yourself
that you didn't know before and you feel
like more of yourself or more of a person.
There's something healing
and life-giving about it.
John Paul II did
not think that motherhood
necessarily means having
biological children,
but that doesn't mean
that he believes women
should avoid having kids and
that is because parenthood
is one of the primary ways
in which both women and men
learn to love at the deepest level.
I remember the first time I held Naomi,
my oldest daughter and she's screaming.
Uh, neh, neh, neh!
And I said, Naomi, Naomi, it's okay.
Daddy's here, daddy's here,
and I don't know what I'm saying.
I'm crying and I'm talking
and when I start talking,
she did one of those.
Meh!
And looked at me and
she looked right at me,
I don't even know if
she could see me or not,
it didn't matter.
She looked right at me
like I knew that voice.
And, yeah, we're talking to the belly
in all those months and whatnot,
but when she responded like
that, something kicked in me.
And I wanted to tell the world.
I wanted to profess to her and
everyone I will die for you.
I will live for you.
And I hate to compare
because, you know, to compare
is to despair, but it took a
while to get that with Melanie,
my wife, right.
Praise God, I'm there,
I will live for her.
I will die for her, but it took a while.
This was within seconds
of this little baby
looking me in the eye and it
was just this instant sense,
you can trust me, is what I felt.
Entrust yourself to me, I will your good
and, yeah, it's hard,
it's unbelievably hard
and it's hard because,
even with each child,
it unravels, it makes bare my own sin.
The more they annoy us,
the more they bother us,
the more they just get under our skin,
is a bigger light bulb that
says, oh, there's something
that hasn't been worked out.
There's a way that I can learn now to see
my own weakness and
defect and to make sure
it doesn't pass to another generation.
I had my first child when I was 35.
I thought these first two
months, these are hard,
but it's gonna get better
and, it did a little bit,
but there was still huge transitions.
I remember even just thinking
about going into the store.
I have to take this child
with me all the time.
I was used to traveling the world.
I lived in France.
I lived in Poland.
I lived in Italy and, suddenly,
my life was just turned
upside down, but the bigger
thing was that I thought,
you know, every week I had this sense
like next week's gonna get easier.
It's gonna be better next week
and then, finally, it dawned on me,
wow, what if it's not
supposed to get easier?
What if there's some real
gifts in this difficulty?
And I'm not even paying attention
because I'm so focused on
when will this get easier.
And, as soon as I kinda had this insight,
like motherhood is supposed
to help take me out of myself,
and help make me more selfless
then, all of a sudden,
motherhood had this whole new cast
and I sort of understood the
things that were happening
internally to my own soul.
I was becoming less self-absorbed
and I was becoming a lot more patient.
I had a lot more compassion,
you know, all those kind of things.
And I think the place where
this was most striking
to me in my life was air travel.
I used to fly a lot and I
always had great seating
and very well taken care of
because I had so many points.
And so, when I had my children,
it had been several years,
all those points were gone.
I had no status.
And, you know, I was so
excited to just be on a plane
and not have anybody bother me.
I didn't care I was in
the back of the plane
and sort of in a corner by myself.
It didn't matter that I wasn't
in business class anymore.
But, prior to that, I think I
was probably a terrible flier
and I would have been
really upset and cranky
about being put back in the back.
So, it was just a small
marker of where my patience
and what kind of person I
was being transformed into
by that experience of just
being grateful for everything
and having a sense of
gratitude instead of, you know,
that awful flier that
nobody wants to deal with
at the front counter.
So, take a married couple.
They've come to the conclusion,
their eyes have been
opened that contraception
is damaging to their relationship.
Does this mean they just
have to have 15 kids?
The Catholic Church has never taught
that couples are obligated
to have as many children
as is physically possible.
Never was the teaching of the church,
never will be the teaching of the church.
But here's the question,
what could a couple do if
they have a good reason
to be avoiding a child,
maybe a financial reason,
maybe a health reason,
maybe they have several kids
that are young and they
just need a break, right.
I can relate.
What could they do to avoid a child
that would not violate the
dignity of their sexual union?
Chances are everybody watching
this is doing it right now.
What could they do?
They could abstain from sex.
There is nothing wrong
with abstaining from sex.
We do it all the time.
Every married couple knows
that abstaining from sex
can be a profound act
of love and, oftentimes,
very often in married life,
love demands abstinence
and, if you can't abstain,
your love is called into question.
You might want to make love,
but you're at the in-laws
and there are thin walls.
If you can't abstain in this situation,
your love is called into question.
You might want to make love,
but one of you is sick.
You might want to make love,
but it's after childbirth.
You might want to make love,
but you're in a public place.
If you can't abstain in these situations,
your love is called into question.
And you might want to make love,
but you have a serious
reason to avoid a child.
If you can't abstain in the situation,
isn't your love called into question?
Does this mean you have to
abstain until you hit menopause?
Well, let's look at that.
A couple past childbearing
years know that if they engage
in intercourse it's not
going to result in a child.
Are they contracepting?
Not at all.
They're accepting the way
their bodies are made,
the way the Creator made them.
Well, guess what, a woman
is naturally infertile
for about two thirds out of every month
during her fertile years.
With modern methods of
natural family planning,
not to be confused with the
old fashioned rhythm method,
we can know with 98 to 99% accuracy,
when we're fertile and
when we're infertile
as a married couple.
Armed with that information,
it's the fertile time.
You have a serious
reason to avoid a child,
what should you do?
The loving thing is to abstain.
It's another part of the
month, you're infertile.
Is there any reason you
have to abstain now?
I don't know are you in a public place?
Are you at the in-laws with thin walls?
Is one of you sick?
If not, if all systems are
go, rejoice, come together.
This is the way God made them.
One of the transformational
realities for Melanie and me
when we first got married was introduction
to what's called natural family planning.
We were grew up Catholic,
thought we'd been around circles,
we never even heard of this before.
So, literally we're on our
Engaged Encounter weekend
sitting on the floor, you
know, one of these evenings,
and this couple, this is not a cliche,
they rolled in with the
little three series BMW,
jumped out of the car and
to the retreat center,
gave a 12-minute talk on
NFP, natural family planning,
and Melanie and I, we
both got graduate degrees.
We're Catholic.
We're looking at them, like what the heck
are they talking about?
I mean they were giving this enthusiastic,
this has changed our marriage.
You know, 98% effective and
bop this and bop, bop, bop.
And we're looking at them
and I'm like we should
find out more about them.
Every other couple in the
room there was like, psshh,
that was a waste of time.
But Melanie and I went up
and we signed our names
to find out more information,
'cause you know what it was?
It was them.
There was something about
them that was attractive.
We weren't sold from
hearing it the first time.
We looked at them and we're like,
whatever they got, we want that.
That was the truth.
That changed our life.
What I found about using
natural family planning
instead of artificial
contraception for child spacing
is it's really more of
an alternative lifestyle
than an alternative to contraception.
It is completely effective.
There are these wonderful modern methods
that have, sometimes, an even
higher effectiveness rate
but it's a mistake to see
it as an alternative to that
because it requires that
you approach human sexuality
from an entirely different perspective.
It is a sacrifice-based
method of child spacing.
You don't get to do whatever
you want whenever you want
and that is the big difference
between natural family
planning and contraception.
The natural family
planning we're talking about,
abstaining from intercourse
during the woman's fertile period,
it amounts to waiting for each other.
But, in contraception, there
is already a statement there,
although, we could wait,
we're not going to wait
and it comes across simply as this,
sex with you is good but
not worth waiting for.
You're not worth waiting for.
You see, my love for you doesn't
inspire self-control in me.
You don't inspire self-control in me.
You see, this is the
point of contraception.
Love is patient, but I'm not.
You see, the problem is
that we have been trained
as a culture, particularly,
since the advent
of the birth control pill to look at love
through the lens of sex.
And it's almost like looking
at a binoculars the wrong way.
We're really called to understand sex
through the lens of love, right.
That sex is a particular
expression of love,
not the false idea that
you get love through sex.
Basically the only
warnings we were ever given,
I think, for casual sex was just make sure
you're wearing protection.
Make sure you're on the pill.
Make sure, so you don't get pregnant.
That's that.
That's the only kind of
warnings I ever heard.
Of course, no one would ever
suggest 'cause it's assumed
you're just gonna
participate in this culture.
No one would ever suggest, if you really,
you know, don't, just maybe don't,
maybe just don't have sex with people.
No one would ever suggest that.
So, it's just like, okay,
well, just wear protection
and the truth was though, like afterwards,
after all those years of
participating in that culture,
I felt that protection
didn't protect me from much.
It didn't even make me
feel protected at the time.
I felt very vulnerable and very hurt.
I felt very afraid of getting pregnant
despite all that protection.
It didn't protect me from my mental pain.
It didn't protect me from the heartache.
Where did I finally find
a vision of sexuality
that actually seemed beautiful to me?
It wasn't what I participated in.
It was, ultimately, I learned it through
the Catholic Church teachings
which later, after college,
I had that roommate
who, a convert roommate,
who was on fire to tell me
about the Catholic Church
teachings on sexuality
and she had also had a
challenging couple years
prior to that and heartache
for a similar background.
It's a little different,
but, anyway, she had told me
all about Theology of the Body
and John Paul II's teaches
this and I thought,
she's a little kooky,
but at the same time,
she was a really good friend.
She was a really sweet girl.
And it made me think about things
I hadn't thought about before
and then, once I read more about it,
I went to events where
people talked about it
and I learned more about it.
I went to a Christopher West conference
and it was very compelling
once I absorbed it
and I thought screw
whatever I was doing before,
I want to be in a relationship
where someone values me,
values my entire being, not just my body,
but my heart and my soul.
And I also don't want to be
in any of those pressure scenarios again.
And I just feel like so much of it was.
That's where John Paul
II is just so amazing.
When he wrote about it,
it was such an appreciation
for women, I felt,
and I liked how he put it.
He said the opposite of love is not hate.
It's to use someone.
It's not just, I hate you.
It's someone just gonna
use you and dispose of you
and don't even care about you
and that's what I had
experienced over and over.
And, at that point, I didn't
want any more to do with that.
It became like an allergic,
like I don't want to
be anywhere near that.
It makes me want to throw up.
I want something better than that.
We know, 50 years after Humanae Vitae,
better than we ever knew at Humanae Vitae.
We've been living in a
contraceptive hothouse.
The experiment's been done.
You could think at the time,
it was possible to think
in, what 1960, 1968,
that contraception was
gonna make things better.
It's not possible to think that now.
It's impossible for
anybody who has eyes to see
to think that contraception
has been an overall benefit
for men, for women, for
children, for our culture.
I am done with all
that I've called love
Won't go back
My heart is all torn up
But you've been here fixing
me with needle and thread
Take my shame for
holding these regrets
My lack of trust
The blame you died to forget
Take it all
Finally set me free
Oh, I hear you calling
As I'm falling apart
Oh, you're here protecting
Awaking my heart
Protecting
Awaking my heart