American Atrocity

There was a time, long before I was born, when sex and the life-giving power of procreation were inexorably connected. Sex was procreation; and procreation was sex. That was the time long before the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, when the ideal, not always lived up to, was that a husband and a wife refrained from sex until they were married. Sex was a sacred act only to be engaged in within marriage. Sex was tied to the sanctity of marriage, and also the sanctity of life. Many people today will look back on that time as archaic, ignorant, repressive, and anti-woman.

Today, in our more “enlightened” time, sex has been turned into a pure act of pleasure, a form of entertainment, and physical fulfillment. Treating another human being as a piece of flesh for our own gratification has become normalized, and in many cases glorified. You don’t have to look any further than widespread proliferation of pornography across the internet, the sexualization of our children, and the “hook up culture” on college campuses to understand that we are teaching our society to treat others like objects. Even the heavy-handed creation of awkward and intrusive standards to ensure consent, has turned sexual activity into a business transaction between two dispassionate parties further separating the love, the romance, and the humanity of the two people involved.

Scientific advancements such as, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy have further separated the sexual act from the life-giving power of procreation. We now live in a time where people can compartmentalize their sexual life from there parental life, where in the past the two were unescapably connected. Some will argue that this is a good thing. That the advancements of birth control have allowed people to take control of their lives, because it has prevented countless unwanted pregnancies from occurring, and to a very narrow perspective, that is absolutely true, but currently in America, there are over 3 million unwanted pregnancies every year, and that is not a failure of birth control, or a failure of everyone to properly use birth control, it is a direct result of the seismic shift in our cultural attitudes toward sex and procreation as a consequence of the propagation of birth control.