In my book on sexual morality1, I divided sexuality into the triad: Courting, mating and bonding. Fifteen years later, While planning to revise my book, I find that division appropriate. Also, fifteen years later, most abortions in the United States are chemically induced miscarrigages. Classifying conception, perhaps implicitly, as an area of sexuality, can lead to a fallacious rationalization for chemically induced abortions.
Conception as a process may be sexual as a part of mating. However, conception as a product is not sexual; the product is a human being at its first stages.
Ignoring the process/product ambiguity of “conception” together with an assumption of the moral neutrality of sexuality can have deadly consequences. At least the consequences are deadly for many humans at their earliest stages. The moral neutrality of sexuality is an assumption that no sexual actvity is immoral apart from considerations of its consequences. Hence, using birth control pills to prevent the process of conception occurring is immoral only if it has very bad consequences whicy is usually not the case. So, those who follow the dominant strand of our culture about sexuality hold that use of contraceptive pills are morally permissible. In other words, they hold “It is morally permissible to use pills to stop conception.” However, it should be read as “It is morally permissible to use pills to stop conception as a process.” If people are not aware of, or ignore, the process/product of “conception, ” it is very easy to accept use of pills to stop, abort, the product of conception,
- Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism, Mustang OK, 2014, p.44