Is the Manahattan Declaration Compromised?

Have you read the Manhattan Declaration? It's the ecumenical document that addresses the issues of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia and assisted suicide, same sex marriage, and conscience protection for those refusing to support those immoralities. It's a wonderful document in many ways and eloquently addresses the issues. But there's a serious omision: contraception.

Roe v. Wade wasn't the court decision that made abortion inevitable. It was Griswold v. Connecticut. That decision plucked out of thin air the "privacy" claim that undergirded Roe. Just as Roe demolished all the laws in the country against abortion, Griswold demolished all the laws against contraception, laws put into place in the 19th century by a Protestant Congress as a matter of fact. And it was the acceptance of contraception and the contraceptive mentality that led, as surely as night follows day, to abortion.

Eminent Catholic lawyer Charles Rice recently pointed out the problem with the Manhattan Declaration in a thoughtful piece in The Observer, an independent paper that serves Notre Dame and St. Mary's in South Bend. Here's an excerpt that addresses the serious flaw in the document:

MD, unfortunately, misreads the origins of the “culture of death.” MD describes “the cheapening of life that began with abortion” and “the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion.” Legalized abortion, however, and the other evils denounced by MD, are not origins, but rather symptoms of the contraceptive ethic that dominates our secularist, relativist and individualist culture....

In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI predicted that the acceptance of contraception would place “a dangerous weapon … in the hands of … public authorities …. for applying to … problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples ... Who will stop rulers from … imposing upon their peoples … the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men would [place] at the mercy of … public authorities the most personal … sector of conjugal intimacy” (No. 17).

The failure of MD, in its catalogue of legalized promotions of the “culture of death,” even to mention the entry by government into the business of subsidizing by contraception the rejection of new life, is inexcusable. Once that role of government was conceded, the other evils denounced by MD were predictable. Perhaps the purpose of MD was to put together a coalition of signers that would include proponents of public funding of contraception. If so, MD politicized and trivialized itself....

MD forthrightly calls attention to evils that transcend the political as a challenge to reason, nature and God himself. MD itself would have transcended the political if it had called on the American people to put their primary reliance on prayer. Without a confrontation of contraception and its promotion by government, and without a serious call to prayer, MD invites dismissal as just another syncretistic manifesto cast in powerful prose that misses the point.

Why did the drafters of the Manhattan Declaration leave out the serious evil of contraception? Even abortifacient "contraception" including the morning after pill, is not mentioned. One can only presume that contraception was seen as a sticking point for potential supporters of the effort. For example, one public defender of contraception is James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and a signer of the Declaration. Presumably there were many others.

Does this serious flaw "invite dismissal as just another synretistic manifesto...that misses the point" as Charles Rice asserts? My gut instinct is to say yes, but when I examine the list of supporters who I admire and respect I feel a little intimidated to say so. But then I think of the millions of babies murdered by abortifacient birth control who dwarf the numbers killed in abortion mills. Was it right to make them invisible? And what about the souls of those who, not only are willing to kill the body, but the soul. If an act of intercourse was meant by God to result in a child and the couple thwarts the natural end of the act, do they not kill a soul will the absolute non-existence of a soul? After all, the aborted babies continue to exist, but the little one who is denied existence is denied the face of God for all eternity.

I've read the Declaration several times and part of me really wants to sign. But so far I just can't get around that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that somehow it's a compromise I don't have the right to make.