Private Matter?

Private Matter?

It is a very old issue. I am old enough to remember when the liberal left was marching and calling on people to be Christian and to stop the war in Vietnam and to integrate the South, and people were telling them to keep their religion to themselves. “Religion is a private matter.” I have watched as the Religious Right has grown and attempted to impose its religious view of life on society and have heard the left claim that “Religion is a private matter.”

The question was presented again recently in the stories about medical doctors who will not give out birth control pills, who will not help with contraceptive information, who lecture their patience on sexual conduct when the patients ask for birth control pills. The doctors affirm that they are practicing their religious convictions and have a right to bring their practice of medicine in accordance with their religious and ethical views. Those who believe this is inappropriate behavior suggest, “Religion is a private matter.”

It is not a new issue. G.K. Chesterton in his essay on August 16, 1919 right after World War I wrestled with the same statement. Religion is a private matter in that the convictions, affirmations, values have to soak into the core of a person for them to be real. But “… if he (the maker of the statement) means that a man’s religion cannot have any effect on his citizenship, or on the commonwealth of which he is a citizen, he (the maker of the statement) escapes from being platitudinous by being preposterous.”

So that if religion is a reality in a person’s life, it will be a reality in the public life of that person. But the more difficult part of that reality is how does the public expression of religion interact with the common life of others who have their own expression of religion or lack of it.

If the doctor were in private practice by herself, then it would seem acceptable for her to say that she does not approve of the practice of birth control, and refuse to prescribe contraceptives. It seems to be that it gets a little more complicated, if she is a partner in a medical practice in which the other doctors do prescribe contraceptives. It is even more complicated; it seems to me, when the doctor is in a hospital that follows the guidelines of the American Medical Association, which says they believe in providing good health care for all people including help with reproductive medicine.

There are no easy solutions to the struggles of private ethical behavior and demands and expectations of the general public. On this small issue, it would seem to me that the provision of contraceptives and birth control measures would be much preferred to the alternative of abortions. The person who asks for birth control pills has already indicated that there is or maybe sexual activity and the prevention of conception would seem to be more moral than the destruction of a fetus.