The "contraceptive culture" has led to unhappy and resentful children and an indifference to the injustice of abortion and introduced insincerity into the love of the couples practising it, according to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin.
Dr Desmond Connell was speaking last night to the Life Society in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, on the 30th anniversary of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae.
He said the Pope's pronouncement against contraception 30 years ago had been regarded as the cause of the alienation of many lay people from the church. "But, as with the problem of the environment, the difficulties associated with contraception took time to emerge."
Dr Connell went on to discuss the changes in family relationships produced by family planning, "a far deeper problem that is as yet hardly discussed".
He told students at Maynooth: "We all know what is meant by the unwanted child, but we do not perhaps sufficiently appreciate what is meant by the child that is wanted. The wanted child is the child that is planned; the child produced by the decision of the parents begins to look more and more like a technological produce.
"This is clear in the case of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, genetic engineering, cloning; but it may not be altogether absent in the practice of family planning.
"A profound alteration in the relationship between parent and child may result when the child is no longer welcomed as a gift but produced as it were to order. Parental attitudes would thereby be affected, creating a sense of consumer ownership as well as a new anxiety to win and retain the child's affection.
"The child no longer belongs to the family in a personal sense if it is radically a product rather than a person. So much of parental ambition has been invested in the one or two children that a properly personal relationship becomes problematic.
"This attitude of parents conveys itself unconsciously to the child, who experiences resentment against a parentage based on power and may produce the kind of teenage revolt we know so well. No child can be happy as a product: the child will find no meaning in a life produced by technology."
Dr Connell opened his lecture by quoting St Thomas More on the relationship between power and moral goodness. "It is likewise in our present culture," said Dr Connell, "which scientific technology has equipped with unprecedented power . . . Humanae Vitae succinctly expresses the radical opposition between this vision [of unqualified human domination over nature] and the vision of right reason confirmed and enlarged by divine revelation.
"The further we advance in the pursuit of control and domination the greater is the risk of forgetting what lies beyond our control - the innate integrity of all that we manipulate and exploit, including even ourselves."
Dr Connell said a plausible case could be argued in favour of contraception on the grounds of expediency and conceded: "It is true that many Catholics dissent from this teaching and live at odds with church authority. It is also true that dissent on an issue that is regarded as important gives rise to a dissenting mentality that may easily spread beyond that particular issue alone. Dissent with regard to contraception lay at the origin of what has come to be known as a la carte Catholicism."
However, he said this was not a reason to accept that contraception was right. "Where does the truth lie? . . . The issue of contraception is the linchpin of the whole of sexual morality. It [the contraceptive pill] broke the bond between intercourse and procreation. This bond with procreation situates sexual relations within a whole order of meaning, which includes the nature of love as an interpersonal mutual gift of self; the complementarity between male and female; the institutions of marriage and family.
"Approval of contraception logically extends the blessing of moral approval to the sexual revolution, which has resulted in the chaos of broken families; co-habitation; promiscuity; uncertainty about the limits that define the nature of the family. It has helped to shape a society of widespread divorce and encouraged such resentment against new life in the womb as to create blindness to the injustice of abortion.
"Contrary to the claim of certain kinds of feminism, women above all are dishonoured. By its resentment towards motherhood, the contraceptive culture drastically reduces what is distinctively feminine in the relation between the sexes; and women, precisely in their feminine difference, are thereby denied, or even willingly surrender, their proper claim to respect and equality as persons."
The archbishop outlined the difference between contraception and avoiding conception through the use of natural methods of family planning. "It is not simply a matter of avoiding conception by taking steps to suppress it.
"People who have no difficulty understanding the difference between avoiding taxation by making use of the opportunity provided by the law, and evading it by suppressing information required by the law, sometimes claim that they see no difference between avoiding conception by abstaining from sexual intercourse when conception is possible, and evading it by contraception.
"We cannot give moral approval to contraception unless we are ready to claim that the generation of new life is merely a by-product, an optional extra, instead of a fulfilment that properly pertains to sexual intercourse . . . To enter into the enjoyment of complete sexual union whilst deliberately obstructing conception involves disrespect towards God as the author of life."
This introduced insincerity into the love between a couple. "Contraception impedes their acceptance of one another in all that they are as male and female, even though such acceptance is the keynote of the love expressed in sexual intercourse . . . The gift of oneself, which is the tribute love offers to the one who is really loved, calls for patience, understanding and the sacrifice of even legitimate interests."
Dr Connell warned priests defending the church on this issue that they would face ridicule, dissent and betrayal, while St Thomas More faced death. "Today the church faces an identical challenge," though the lives of pastors were not threatened.