‘Natural Law offers the most reliable response to the issues raised by contraception’ Discuss.

Natural law is a deontological theory that is most commonly associated with St Thomas Aquinas, a theological ethicist and philosopher. The theory derives what is good and evil from the rational nature of humans and the world around them. It looks at the world for moral absolutes because the theory is based in the principle that God ordered the world in a certain way and this suggests how we should behave. Contraception is the active blocking of allowing conception to happen via artificial means or more natural methods. This essay will discuss how useful Natural law is when responding to the issues raised by contraception and conclude that it is of little use to a certain extent. Natural law theory used precepts to judge whether an action is considered good of evil. These primary precepts are rules inbuilt into humans as a consequence of being a product of God. They describe general rules that human should follow (prescriptive). Examples of these precepts are to; preserve life, reproduce, worship God and ordered society. Secondary precepts are the actions which you take to implement the primary precepts; for example, worship Gods secondary precept would be to go to church. When making decisions about contraception it becomes difficult to apply these principles. Natural law would argue that it is wrong because it prevents the happening of the precepts such as to reproduce which the secondary precept would be to have sex with the purpose of reproduction. The Catholic church also argued that the use of contraception creates a disordered society because you have to be able to universalise these goods and to say that everyone can use contraception would mean that everyone would have sex without purpose which promotes hedonism/pleasure seeking rather than the intended purpose. Many would criticise this however and argue that without contraception society would be disordered because there would be many more unwanted pregnancies. In the situation of rape, one could argue that if a women was on the contraceptive pill, the unwanted forced chance of conception would be prevented and so this protects a women from the potential aftermath of the act. It is hard to argue in modern society that contraception shouldn’t be allowed as it creates a disordered society. Due to the lack of contraception in countries such as the Philippians it has resulted in over population and a lack of resources to sustain the population; one could argue that the introduction of contraception would resolve this issue and in fact be better for the environment because there are less people disrupting it. Therefore, the primary precepts are difficult to apply in the modern world when using natural law to respond to issues raised about contraception.