Contraceptive Catholics: Rationalizing Family Planning, Agency, and Religion Itself

Abstract

The Catholic Church prohibits the use of artificial contraceptive methods, a teaching it clarified with the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. However, almost the same proportion of sexually active Catholic women uses contraception as compared with the rest of the population--about 98 percent. To delve into this disconnect, I have inquired into eight practicing Catholic women's lives to learn whether their rational approaches (informed by Max Weber's rationality typology) to this issue inform their judgment of the question and its application in their personal lives. Their perceived control of their fertility, their circumstances, and their relationships with their husbands and God all factored into their individualized combinations and applications of these rationality types and the diverse reasons for selecting the family planning method that they do. Each constructs a morality and a Catholicism according to her individual experience, belief, and needs.