The Female Body and the Culture of Life

Dominant narratives in our contemporary culture typically portray respect for women—and especially for women’s bodies—as in conflict with respect for preborn human life. According to this common trope, we simply have to decide whose rights take priority—the rights of women, or the rights of preborn children—but one or the other will necessarily be sacrificed. We are so accustomed to this conflict narrative, pitting women against their preborn children, that even those of us who recognize its falsity nonetheless can fail to appreciate how jarringly unintuitive this narrative would have sounded to most people—especially most women—for most of human history, up until less than a century ago.

As Erika Bachiochi points out in her excellent book, The Rights of Women, “Until the mid-twentieth century, women’s rights advocates opposed infanticide and abortion, often speaking of the two together; most also disapproved of contraception” (202). Bachiochi explains that these early feminists viewed “contraceptive methods and abortion as technological incursions into women’s bodies and facilitators of male oppression of women” (115). For instance, nineteenth-centurty feminist and female suffrage advocate Mattie Brinkerhoff wrote: “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society—so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that . . . she has been greatly wronged” (214). On the question of contraception, early feminists “feared that, by attempting to separate sex from childbearing, these [artificial birth control] methods would embolden men to engage in infidelity, prostitution, promiscuity, or even marital rape” (109). Although these feminists “sought freedom from excessive pregnancies and childbearing, [they] also sought respect and authority for motherhood and freedom from male sexual tyranny.” And they believed that “the solution to both . . . was abstinence and a single sexual moral standard restraining both women’s and men’s sexual impulses” (110, quoting historian Tracy Thomas).

So how did we move from this vision of women’s rights as inherently bound up with respect for the rights of preborn children and the disciplining of both male and female sexual desire, to our contemporary culture in which the very term “women’s rights” is taken to be synonymous with a right to abortion on demand and unlimited sex without procreative consequences? How can we unmask the falsity of this narrative to a culture that seems to take its truth for granted? And what do we need in order to restore the cultural recognition that true respect for women goes hand in hand with respect for preborn children?

In my remarks, I would like to consider each of these questions: how we got here, why this narrative pitting women against their preborn children (and indeed against their own reproductive capacities) is false, and what the solution is.

How We Got Here

So how did we get here? To simplify a complicated story—and here I draw on the excellent work of Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—there was a three-part revolution in our understanding of the human person. First, there was a shift from a view of the person in which embodiment and social embeddedness are central to one’s personal identity, to what is often referred to as “expressive individualism,” a romantic view of the person as defined by inner psychological states, often in opposition to the societal demands of institutions such as family, church, or nation. This reduction of the self to psychological states goes hand in hand with materialism and the abandonment of a transcendent view of human nature. Second, this psychologized view of the self was sexualized, leading to what Helen Alvaré has called “sexual expressionism,” according to which one’s sexual feelings—and the freedom to express and act on those feelings—are at the core of personal identity and dignity. Finally, this sexualized self was politicized, as neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers identified political liberation with sexual liberation and the dismantling of traditional sexual norms.

The result of this tripartite revolution in our culture’s understanding of the human person was captured in the 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade’s claim that there is a constitutional right to abortion. Although both Roe and Casey have now been overturned, the understanding of the human person reflected in Casey nonetheless remains dominant in our culture. In one of the most notorious sentences in the history of American jurisprudence, the Casey opinion states: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." And central to that liberty to define oneself, according to the Casey court, is sexual expression. “For two decades,” says the Court, “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

Let us unpack in a bit more detail what this sexual expressionist view of the person—and the exaltation of sexual expression as the most fundamental of our political rights—implies. At the core of sexual expressionism is the assumption that the right to sexual expression requires the ability to express and act upon one’s sexual desires without any responsibility for the natural consequences of such activity—namely, children. Sexual expressionism attempts to sever not only the inherent connection between sex and procreation, but also the inherent connection between sex and marriage. On this view, sex could be a way of expressing love and commitment or of seeking to have a child, if that is what you happen to want, but it need not involve any of these things if you do not want it to. Philosopher Igor Primoratz exemplifies this view in his book Ethics and Sex, where he claims that there is no inherent meaning or purpose to sex beyond the attainment of sexual pleasure, and thus no special moral norms governing sexual activity. (As an aside, it is worth noting that Primoratz’s view—which is simply a systematic philosophical statement of the dominant cultural view of sex—cannot make sense of why the injustice of rape is different from or worse than non-sexual forms of assault and battery. This alone should reveal to us how deeply at odds sexual expressionism is with genuine respect for women.)

Of course, the pesky biological fact remains that sexual intercourse is a step in the process of human reproduction—that is what makes it sexual in the first place—and so the sexual expressionist culture must do everything it can to alter this biological reality and hide it from consciousness. Thus the “right” to “consequence-free” sex is made possible by hormonal birth control, with abortion available as a back-up when birth control fails—necessary since the only 100% effective method of birth control is abstinence. As the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) reports, over 50% of women seeking abortions were using some form of birth control when they got pregnant. And we have already seen that the contraception-abortion connection was central to the Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v Casey decision—thankfully now overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson.

In other words, without the technological innovation of hormonal birth control and its widespread societal acceptance, it seems doubtful that the sexual expressionist view of the self would have ever achieved such cultural dominance. The implication is that a culture that sees sexual expression as the core of personal identity is necessarily also a culture that rejects women’s unique biological capacity for motherhood, both in theory and in practice. This rejection was clear in the work of second-wave feminists. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, argues in the Second Sex that “freedom from reproductive slavery” through effective contraception and abortion is essential to women’s liberation (139). For De Beauvoir, a key obstacle to women’s liberation is the female body itself, which—by contrast with the male body—is inherently in conflict with women’s transcendent “vocation as a human being” (723). As she says in an interview in the early 1970s, “women will not be liberated until they have been liberated from their children” (Simone de Beauvoir Today, 39). And in another interview she argues that it is not enough for women to hold positions of power in society, but that women’s equality will not really be attained until we “destroy the concept of motherhood.” Even more explicitly, Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex argues that women’s social inequality is rooted in “the biological division of the sexes,” and thus that the only way to achieve women’s social equality is to eliminate “the sex distinction itself,” by replacing natural sexual reproduction with “artificial reproduction,” and in this way putting an end to “the tyranny of the biological family” (ch.1).

Thus we find ourselves in a situation in which women’s liberation is conceived of in a way that requires rejecting and manipulating women’s bodies to be able to have sex whenever we desire, while only taking on the responsibility of parenthood when (or if) we happen to want to. And even then, there is an attempt to eradicate biological sex differences in procreation through technology, thus rejecting women’s unique capacity to nourish a developing child within her body. This is how we have gotten to the place in which “women’s rights” have come to be synonymous with “reproductive rights,” which in turn is code for unfettered access to birth control and abortion, on the one hand, and—ironically—reproductive technologies on the other hand.

Unmasking the Falsity of the Sexual Expressionist View of Women’s Rights

But why is this a false vision of women’s rights? As with my answer to the question of how we got here, there is much more to say on this point than I can possibly cover here, but let me just highlight a few key points.

First, this sexual expressionist vision of women’s liberation requires manipulating women’s bodies by altering them hormonally in ways that many—including many who have no moral objections to birth control or abortion—are now recognizing to be harmful to women’s physical and psychological health in both the short-term and long-term. Indeed, the burden of achieving supposedly “consequence-free” sex is one that falls almost entirely on women. While there have been and continue to be attempts to make a male birth control pill, so far the trials have always been stopped because of the side effects—side effects like acne, mood swings, and decreased libido that women on the pill have been putting up with for decades. By contrast, early versions of the female birth control pill had lethal side-effects for some women—one woman died in early clinical trials—but trials continued and more women died after the pill was made widely available. While newer versions of the pill are a bit safer, they still increase the risk of heart attack and stroke—in some cases doubling or even tripling the risk—and high-estrogen versions of the pill are labeled Group 1 carcinogens by the WHO. Although the absolute risk still remains relatively low, we are talking about a drug taken by millions of women throughout their reproductive years, so that increased risk translated into close to 2,000 contraceptive-caused strokes per year in the U.S. alone. But the medical establishment deems this risk acceptable because there is said to be a direct “health benefit” to the woman. As one article puts it: “Women taking some versions of the pill increase their risk of conditions such as blood clots, but this is balanced by the risk that pregnancy would present to their health.” Note that pregnancy—i.e. the healthy functioning of a woman’s body—is treated here as if it were a disease. By contrast, the article says that even relatively mild side-effects of male birth control have been deemed unacceptable because there is no direct health benefit to men. In other words, since only women can get pregnant, they are the ones who are burdened with the results of unprotected sex, and therefore they are the ones who should be burdened with the side effects of hormones to control their fertility.

So much for calling on men to bear their fair share of responsibility, despite the fact that it tends to be men more than women who desire to engage in uncommitted sexual encounters. As Leah Fessler points out in an insightful article on the hook-up culture at Middlebury College, for women the desire for sex is usually more about emotional connection than mere physical pleasure. Fessler found that sexual encounters outside of committed relationships are dehumanizing and often not even pleasant for women, who are much less likely than men to achieve sexual climax outside of a committed relationship. Writing about her own experiences and that of her friends, Fessler comments:

My girlfriends and I were top students, scientists, artists, and leaders. We could advocate for anything—except for our own bodies. We won accolades from our professors, but the men we were sleeping with wouldn’t even eat breakfast with us the next morning.

She and her friends, she says, “were desperate to know what it felt like to be wanted; desperate for a chance at intimacy.” The men with whom they were hooking up, however, seemed not to care. Months after Leah had stopped hooking up with a classmate named Ben, he told her: “I didn’t think of you as a human being while we were hooking up.” If that is not an indication of the way in which sex without commitment—and the sexual expressionist culture more broadly—dehumanizes women and objectifies their bodies, I am not sure what is.

This points to an important but often overlooked reality that Erika Bachiochi calls “sexual asymmetry.” In other words, the risks of uncommitted sex are asymmetrical—for women those risks are very high, whereas for men the risks are low. Conversely, while ultimately I believe that neither men nor women actually benefit from uncommitted sexual encounters—indeed, the research of Fessler and others indicates that neither men nor women are satisfied with the hook-up culture—the benefits from those encounters at least in terms of sexual pleasure are much higher for men on average than for women, and the risks to them physically and psychologically are much lower. Hormonal birth control and legalized abortion as a “back-up contraceptive” make women more sexually available to men—also depriving them of the excuses that they used to be able to give to say no when being pressured into sex by their boyfriends—and then make women bear the whole burden of that sexual availability. And because abortion is the woman’s choice, the man also feels more readily absolved of any responsibility to support the child if she chooses not to abort. She is the one who has to deal with the side-effects of birth control; she is the one who has to make the heart-wrenching decision of whether to abort if birth control fails; and she is the one who has to either deal with the physical and psychological consequences of abortion, or with the responsibilities of parenthood.

The asymmetry here is unavoidable, because it is based on unalterable biological differences between men and women. But instead of calling on men to take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions—and to control their sexual desires until they are ready to do so—society tries to mask this asymmetry through manipulation of women’s bodies. But technical manipulation of women’s bodies does not change the fact that women are simply more vulnerable to the effects of uncommitted sex, both physically and emotionally. Instead, technology just places new and even more onerous burdens on women to manipulate their bodies and eliminates the cultural pressures that, in the past, pushed men to be responsible.

In addition to manipulating women’s reproductive and sexual capacities so that it is possible (at least for men) to have uncommitted sex without bearing the associated burdens or risks, the culture of sexual expressionism also treats a woman’s fertility as something extrinsic to her overall personal reality, as if it were a machine that could be turned off when children are not wanted, and then turned on again to produce a child in short order whenever one is desired. The reality, however, is that a woman’s fertility is not a machine that can be turned off and on at will without consequences. Many women find that when they do finally want to become pregnant, being on the pill for years has masked or caused problems that make it difficult for them to conceive or sustain a pregnancy. And when this happens, rather than trying to understand and treat the underlying problems contributing to infertility, the standard medical approach generally settles for a relatively superficial investigation of the cause and then quickly recommends another technological work-around in which the woman's body is manipulated yet again (in ways that involve serious health risks for both woman and child) in order to conceive via IVF. (Before saying more about the problems with IVF, it is worth mentioning that I know from personal experience how devastating infertility can be. And in most cases couples pursuing IVF are simply following the recommendations of their doctor without awareness of the ethical issues or of alternative approaches—discussed below—that are more respectful of both women and children.)

IVF involves a number of health risks for women—including the risks of hyperstimulation of the ovaries to produce multiple eggs that are then harvested for fertilization outside the body—and it instrumentalizes the woman’s body for its reproductive capacity, performing interventions that do not actually aim to restore her health, but rather place her health at risk and manipulate her body (or another woman’s body, in the case when an egg donor is used) in order to get the raw materials necessary to produce a child.

The failure to respect the dignity of the child in IVF is even more stark than the failure to respect the dignity of the woman. Children conceived through IVF are subjected to the logic of manufacture and production, in which efficiency and customer satisfaction are the paramount values. For the sake of efficiency, IVF is usually done in a way that attempts to produce multiple embryos at once. Those embryos are then subjected to “quality control” screening, in which embryologists rank the embryos according to a grading system, selecting the healthiest for transfer to the woman’s uterus, discarding low quality embryos, and cryo-preserving any additional high-quality embryos. The fate of these frozen embryos—of which there are estimated to be roughly five million in the United States alone—is uncertain; most remain in cryo-storage indefinitely. The quality control element of the IVF process is intensified when genetic testing is done on the embryos, making it possible to select embryos based on the presence or absence of certain traits or diseases. While IVF could be done using only one or two eggs per cycle and transferring all embryos produced to the uterus—thus avoiding the problem of what to do with excess embryos and minimizing the eugenic, quality control aspect of the process, as well as lowering the risk to the woman—the logic of efficiency almost always trumps these considerations about respecting the value of embryonic human life and the dignity of the woman’s body.

IVF’s approach toward the child as a product manufactured to satisfy the desires of the would-be parent or parents is also seen in the practice of “selective reduction.” Sometimes when an unwanted multiple-fetus pregnancy occurs (often because more than one embryo was transferred to the uterus to increase the likelihood of success), one or more of the “excess” fetuses are aborted in order to avoid the risks and complications of a multiple pregnancy, or simply because the parent(s) do not want that many children. A 2011 New York Times article discussing this practice recounts the story of a woman named Jenny, who became pregnant with twins through IVF, and chose to abort one of them. Jenny’s reflections on her decision reveal how IVF rests on an attitude toward children as products of manufacture made to satisfy the desires of the adults who commissioned their creation. She says:

If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.

Let me reiterate that last line: “This became yet another thing we could control.” This line captures the core of the prevalent cultural attitudes surrounding human sexuality and procreation, which is the presumption that we can and should have complete control over our reproductive and sexual capacities by manipulating those capacities at will to suit our own preferences and desires. And this can only be done by treating the human body—particularly the bodies of women and of nascent human beings—as an object of technical manipulation, rather than as an essential aspect of the human person that deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. What we see, in other words, is that the failure to respect nascent human life actually goes hand in hand with a failure to respect women, because in pitting women against their babies, the sexual expressionist culture ends up pitting women—and society as a whole—against their own bodies, leading to a relationship culture that gives men all the power and reduces women to sexual objects, and to a medical culture that treats women’s bodies as objects of technical manipulation.

I should add here that the systemic effects of all this in the medical field have been terrible for women’s health, because standard medical training teaches doctors, on the one hand, to view women’s fertility as a disease to be “cured” with hormonal birth control or abortion, and on the other hand to see procreation as a consumer choice to be achieved through technical means when desired; but in neither case is women’s fertility understood as intrinsic to health. And the result is that most doctors—including ob-gyns—receive inadequate training about how a woman’s menstrual cycle relates to her overall health, or about how to identify and treat the underlying causes of women’s health problems, including infertility.

As an aside, let me also note that the treatment of human embryos in the IVF process is perhaps the greatest pro-life crisis of our time, involving the wholesale destruction of millions of human beings, and the indefinite freezing of millions more. It is estimated that fewer than 3% of embryos created through IVF result in a live birth. But sadly many who are otherwise committed to the culture of life fail to recognize this, so this is an area in which more public education is desperately needed, in order to at least create public support for regulations like those in Germany and Italy, limiting the number of embryos created through IVF to the number that the woman can immediately gestate. And while there is no simple solution to the plight of the millions of embryos already in cryostorage, I do think that embryo adoption is the response that best respects the dignity of these most vulnerable and forgotten children, and that if done in the right way, the practice of embryo adoption involves none of the injustices to women and children that are inherent in IVF.[1]

An Alternative Vision

Now that I have explained how our culture has come to accept the sexual expressionist ideology that pits women against their preborn children, and why that ideology is false and harmful to women, let me now offer an alternative vision. And since the false sexual expressionist approach rests on driving a wedge between marriage, sex, and babies—three things that most cultures throughout history have considered to be, at least ideally, inextricably interconnected—it is unsurprising that the solution I propose will be a reunification of this triad. In other words, we will not be able to recover a culture a life that respects both women and preborn children without correcting our culture’s distorted understanding of sex. What we need is an alternative approach to sexuality that respects the dignity of the body as an intrinsic aspect of the human person, an approach that contrasts with sexual expressionism’s claim that sex has no inherent meaning or purpose and need not involve anything beyond the consensual use of one’s own or another’s body to achieve sexual pleasure.

This alternative approach, based on natural law and in accord with the Judeo-Christian tradition, recognizes that sex does have an inherent meaning, and that meaning is marriage, a uniquely all-encompassing union of persons that is inherently oriented toward procreation and family life. The ability to literally become one flesh with another human being by joining the two halves of the human reproductive system in sexual intercourse is the biological foundation of the marital community, a community that is different in kind, not just in degree, from all other forms of human community, insofar as it involves a unity of persons not only at the level of mind and heart, but also at the level of the body. And because this bodily unity is possible only through the joining of the two halves of the reproductive system in an act that is part of the process of reproduction, marriage is also the only kind of community that is inherently oriented to procreation. Sexual intercourse is thus literally the embodiment of the marital community, the actualization and expression of the commitment a man and woman make to each other in their marriage vows. Engaging in sexual intercourse when there is no marital community to embody therefore fails to respect the inherent meaning of one’s bodily action and involves a kind of alienation from one’s bodily self in which one treats one’s body as a sub-personal object for the achievement of pleasure in isolation from any genuine human good. It also involves a failure to respect the child that might result from one’s sexual union, because it risks bringing a child into the world in the absence of a marital community that would enable the child to receive the united love and care of his or her parents within a stable family.

This alternative approach to sexuality is precisely the one proposed by Pope St. John Paul II. As he writes in Evangelium Vitae, “the trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life” (§97). And this trivialization of sex is also, at the very same time, a special threat to the dignity and equality of women, as noted in Mulieris Dignitatem (§10). John Paul II recognized and spoke about this inextricable connection between sexual integrity and respect for both women and children throughout his ministry. In an insightful retreat talk directed specifically to male students, he warns young men against the temptation to let their sexual desires get the better of them and to “take” from a woman, “fall[ing] into the role of a primitive profiteer or exploiter,” and then leaving the woman to “take on the whole burden of [the] life” created through his action.[2] He criticizes men for failing to assume responsibility and for saying things like: “Go and find a doctor. I’ll give you the money. Why on earth did you let this happen? There is such a thing as contraception.” John Paul II here clearly shows his awareness of the ways in which contraception and abortion facilitate male domination and objectification of women, rather than liberating them as the sexual expressionist culture would have us believe. By contrast, when speaking to the female students he encourages them to cultivate “interior independence” by developing their relationship with Christ, and tells them, “The man must come to understand that the woman is a person, that she can be a mother, and that motherhood is a wonderful thing and a profound experience—and one in which the man cannot simply assume the role of spectator. With her motherhood she communicates to him the inestimable value of fatherhood.”[3] Notice here the inherent connection in John Paul II’s words between respecting the woman as a person, and respecting her capacity for motherhood. This truth is precisely the inverse of the lie propagated by our sexual expressionist culture. And this truth is emphasized by John Paul II throughout his pontificate. In Mulieris Dignitatem, for instance, he writes: “It is . . . necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman. No program of ‘equal rights’ between women and men is valid unless it takes this fully into account” (§18). In that same document he laments that all too often—as with the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel—the price of sexual irresponsibility is one which the woman “alone pays and she pays all alone! How often,” he goes on to say, “is she abandoned with her pregnancy” and left on her own to care for the child, or pressured by the man to ‘get rid of’ the child and then left to suffer psychologically as a result” (§17). The solution, as John Paul II explains while commenting on Genesis in Mulieris Dignitatem, is to order our sexuality “to the mutual relationship of man and woman in marriage,” the only situation in which “the woman’s ‘sincere gift of self’ is responded to and matched by a corresponding ‘gift’ on the part of the husband,” and in which “both of them, and in particular the woman, ‘discover themselves’ as a true ‘unity of the two’ according to the dignity of the person.”

This alternative approach to sexuality goes hand in hand with an alternative approach to fertility, one which recognizes the inherent connection between sex and procreation, and which calls for regulation of fertility or healing of infertility in ways that fully respect the bodies of women and children precisely by respecting that inherent connection. There are fertility-awareness-based methods like NAPRO (natural procreative technologies)—or, more broadly, the field of restorative reproductive medicine—that can help couples either avoid or achieve pregnancy by understanding and working with the woman’s body rather than manipulating it. Such approaches are gaining popularity even among those who disagree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality, simply because they make it possible to regulate one’s fertility without shutting down one’s menstrual cycle or taking health-disrupting hormones; instead, one can avoid pregnancy by tracking one’s cycle, noting the presence of certain biomarkers that indicate the approach of ovulation, and avoiding sexual activity within one’s fertile window. Although this is not without challenges and requires discipline from both spouses, tracking one’s cycle in this way, paired with other minor tests (such as bloodwork to determine hormone levels throughout the cycle or ultrasounds to monitor follicular development), also provides crucial information to help identify the underlying causes of infertility in couples struggling to conceive or to sustain a pregnancy. Once these underlying causes are identified, most of them can be remedied.

This approach is at least as effective as IVF in enabling most couples to have a child. But unlike IVF, restorative reproductive medicine heals the underlying causes of infertility, enabling couples to conceive naturally, and it respects the woman’s body—actually promoting the woman’s overall health—rather than manipulating the body and risking health to achieve a desired outcome. This general method of paying attention to the woman’s cycle as a crucial indicator of overall health—rather than responding to women’s health complaints by using the pill to mask problems while sometimes actually creating or exacerbating them in the long run—is also starting to catch on outside the Catholic world at least among more holistic medical practitioners, with books that speak of a woman’s cycle as a “monthly report card” on her overall health,[4] or as a “fifth vital sign.” Yet unfortunately standard medical training is woefully inadequate in this regard, because the standard model views women’s fertility more as a quasi-disease to be manipulated and controlled, rather than as an important aspect of women’s health to be understood and respected.

Conclusion

In sum, the widespread use of hormonal birth control with abortion as a back-up in order to support the “right” to consequence-free sex, and the manipulation of women’s bodies and commodification of children through reproductive technologies in order to be able to have children on demand, are both causes and fruits of the problematic cultural presumption that respect for women is inherently in conflict with respect for preborn human life.

This cultural presumption is in stark contrast to what we might call a vocational vision of sexuality and of human life more broadly, a vision in which we are called to recognize that, although we should make reasonable efforts to plan our lives (including our childbearing) responsibly, we need to do so not with a view toward being absolute masters of our lives, but rather with a desire to be responsive and attentive to the unique calling that God has for each us. And such responsiveness necessarily includes respecting the moral law that God has made known to us through both reason and revelation—a law that protects the profound and intrinsic dignity of every human person understood as a unity of body and soul, and that guides us toward genuine fulfillment. This vocational vision, in line with natural law, Judeo-Christian revelation, and the teachings of John Paul II, calls us to respect our bodies and their procreative capacities, rather than treating them as sexual objects or reproductive machines. And it calls us to recognize that children are gifts to whom no one has a right, but rather who deserve our unconditional love and care, even when their arrival is unplanned. Ultimately it is this vocational approach to life that is the key to respect for the dignity of both women and children, and to a cultural vision that recognizes the inextricable connection between the protection of nascent human life, and the true flourishing of women, men, and society as a whole.