What is Marriage?!

12. Union and Procreation

The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.

Translation: Second paragraph of paragraph 12. Union and Procreation. This paragraph explains that the marriage between man and wife create two qualities between these two people: 1. Having sex with each other and 2. Creating a child. And if these two qualities can be saved for marriage then it preserves the significance of the mutual love and upholds the responsibility of parenthood between both parents. Marriage is an oath to your spouse and to your child.

I believe that contraceptive possibilities change how we think and act about our sexual activity and more importantly, marriage. I understand where Pope Paul VI is coming from in connecting marriage with sex and family with the prior constraints that people don’t have sex until they are married and married couples don’t use contraceptives. So if people use contraceptives outside of ‘wedlock,’ what is the point of marriage? Marriage is the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law. A marriage (ceremony) is a social construction that connects to people in the eyes of society and almost ‘allows’ the couple to continue into their intimate, sexual future. But if couples allow themselves to move into this intimate, sexual future without this acceptance from society, do they even need the marital recognition? If they are able to avoid procreation, it seems to make sense that they are able to avoid the union.

Another aspect of contraceptives and marriage is the economical costs of all of these activities. What if you don’t have the money to have the marriage ceremony that you want or if you don’t have the money to support bringing a child into this world? What if your mutual love for each other is so strong and ready, but your financial status is not? It depends on what sex is for a couple. Does it help to explain how much you love each other? Or does it help to explain that you want to have a child together? From what I have gathered from Pope Paul VI, it is both. They are intertwined and you can not only have one. It seems like this marital union leads to sexual intimacy which leads to procreation and inevitably a one-directional straight line. It seems like our technologies that we have created in our life allow us to change the direction of that straight line. Does that lessen the significance or understanding of Pope Paul VI? No! It just helps us to realize the basis of our knowledge and makes us realize the changes of social construction that our technologies can lead us to.