Reevaluating the Meaning of "Aid"

For decades, the US has been one of the largest suppliers of contraception in developing nations, providing funding for delivering contraceptive devices to an estimated 47 million women and couples in places like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Yemen.

With the disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development last week, that funding will now vanish.

The frustrated rhetoric surrounding the move is telling: “This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid,” one news piece noted, “but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty.”

The measure has been received as an anti-poverty one, in other words, as a hindrance to the social and economic progress these nations may otherwise continue to make. Indeed, contraceptive use is so ubiquitous, at this point, that access to it is often seen as a basic human right, as well as a necessary component of manageable, stable socio-economic growth.

Even among Christians, there aren’t that many voices who will take a principled stand against contraception or assumptions like these ones. Catholics do, and individual Protestants may, but such views are taken as more and more antiquated, almost irrelevant to contemporary public discourse. Much of this, of course, stems from a loss of a sacramental vision of the world. Catholics believe that the way we handle our physicality is profoundly important for our spirituality: the material world points to and is informed by an order beyond itself, and so we approach what’s visible or bodily with the desire to live in harmony with those spiritual realities, in response to the invisible, transcendent order that’s imprinted onto the whole of the visible world. This is a far cry from the modern view of materiality, where freedom and self-expression are our ultimate goods, and so if something bodily or material gets in the way, we just adjust it. With science. Or policy.

But it’s worth noting that our self-authorized scientific and political “adjustments” tend to get us in over our heads. The irony of the backlash over contraceptive aid is that it’s happening at the same time that the West is facing a population growth crisis. Every few weeks, a new headline appears dreading the socio-economic catastrophe looming if young people don’t start having more children. Our widespread acceptance of contraception has allowed us to engineer a world where couples can have kids at their leisure, and this sometimes means not at all. So some social scientists and politicians are trying to clue us into some of the rather knotty consequences we’ve courted as a result – the groaning economic weight a smaller working population will have to bear, if something doesn’t change. It turns out, then, that human beings aren’t perfect at handling matters that have to do with both personal choice and the larger common good. For all our good qualities, we are people absorbed with self-interest, and that’s a wound we haven’t yet found a way to engineer our way out of.

Of course, the motives for wanting to continue funding for contraceptive services to developing nations are good: no one wants a woman to suffer because of a pregnancy she’s not equipped to carry, whether physically, mentally, or economically. And, no one wants to see families sweating over the prospect of having one more mouth to feed, when bellies are already far from full. But our Western minds have blind spots that perhaps ought to make us just a little bit more modest about the “aid” we’ve been or ought to be providing. We’re suffering from a spiritual ailment, for sure, that prevents us from understanding the full meaning and dignity of our physical bodies; but we’re also suffering in much more practical, immediate ways from our pride. To fund contraception in these nations, and to take steps to increase demand for it, is to assist in (or, at least, to not abstain from) exporting a family- and population-management strategy that we’re now suffering from. That seems unfair, and uncaring. Before protesting this particular policy change, then, it might be worth taking a moment to reevaluate what “aid” really means, and in what ways we’re really equipped to offer it.

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In the parable of the prodigal son, which son are you?