How the Outdated Became Empowering The Church's teaching on reproduction is coming back in style

As a Gen Z Catholic woman, I find it funny when beliefs that secularists labeled “outdated” become increasingly popular in my generation today. One of these beliefs relates to birth control and natural family planning.

Following the release of Humanae Vitae, secularists panned the Church’s view against artificial contraception as “outdated and incomplete.” With the development of the birth control pill, women were able to more effectively space out the number of children they had or even avoid having children altogether. This newfound agency over their reproductive systems gave women a sense of empowerment: women could go to work full-time or pursue whatever opportunity they wanted without having to leave due to pregnancy or children.

One of the first advertisements for the Pilltapped into this exact sensation: “From the beginning woman has been a vassal to the temporal demands . . . of the cyclic mechanism of her reproductive system. Now to a degree heretofore unknown, she is permitted normalization . . . of cyclic function” (132). Women are depicted as slaves to their reproductive systems, so the promise of regulating reproduction gave women hope that they could be more detached from it and, frankly, more like men.

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