What Carrying Capacity?

A sub-section of paragraph 17, entitled Limits to Man’s Power, in Humanae Vitae states the following:

“…unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions…”

The Church is essentially trying to put “man” (that’s us) in his place. Though it wants humanity to use its intellectual capacity for further innovation (as they dutifully mentioned in the paragraph 16), we are not allowed to tamper with the natural order of our bodies. Be highly controlled with your actions, they say, but don’t try to prevent certain foreseeable consequences. In this paragraph, Pope Paul VI is explicitly referring to the prevention of pregnancy but we could honestly apply this policing principle to many of the Catholic Church’s self-proclaimed “laws.”

The logic is simple coming from the Pope. We are all God’s children, correct? Okay, correct; if you believe in the Intelligent Design theory, humanity has been created by someone/thing greater than us. Let’s call this being Father, shall we? Now The Church (explicitly referred to as a female “she” in Humanae Vitae) is our Mother. Mother and Father are telling us to follow the rules, rules (of course) that have been arbitrarily created to belittle us into the infantile state we will always seem to be in their eyes. I have been taught to respect my parents, but this is a bit ridiculous.

I think Pope Paul had good intentions when writing Humanae Vitae; humanity can be unruly and our own laws hardly keep everything in check. I also think that nature does run its course in some respects. But the body, however, in not unpredictable like nature. There are causes and effects to everything we do to our bodies, and with pregnancy both cause and effect can be controlled. It’s a bit inappropriate to not try to fix a wrong or prevent a wrong from happening when the solution is evident. In many respects, this rule is a bit out of place especially in a day and age where birth control is so normally used, be it for birth control or acne treatment.

Social implications of following the ‘natural order’: a population boom (one that can hardly be sustained)! So unless the Pope has an idea for feeding the exponentially growing mass of believers or just simply wants us to go extinct, this law probably won’t make it.