“When young women go to college, they are instantly expected to fall into the hook-up culture,” Richard Doerflinger says in Part 2 of this interview. “Their initial feeling is ‘I’m free. I’m liberated from all these restrictive norms. Nobody’s watching. Sex is consequence-free.’” And yet, among these young women is more depression, anxiety, isolation, suicidal thoughts, and cutting “to know you’re alive,” he notes. “Then they can’t figure out why they feel so miserable.”
Watch part 1 here: https://youtu.be/RSUCTbkjOtM
More about Richard Doerflinger: https://lozierinstitute.org/team-member/richard-doerflinger/
Chapters
00:00 The Impact of Contraception on Society
02:49 Consequences of the Contraceptive Mindset
05:49 Moral Norms and Their Importance
09:10 The Dangers of Relativism
11:56 The Role of Experience in Moral Decision Making
15:06 The Breakdown of Marriage and Family
18:14 The Need for Moral Absolutes
21:08 Reviving Natural Intuition
23:59 The Long-Term Effects of Individual Choices
26:55 The Importance of Sharing Experiences
Transcript (Please note the transcript is auto-generated and contains errors)
Richard Doerflinger (00:00)
the social science part of it. What happens when people pass new, broader, more sweeping contraceptive programs? Do they reduce abortions? And I ended up doing a fact sheet with a couple of dozen references, concluding that they don’t reduce abortions in a number of cases, they have increased abortions. The contraceptives have given people a false sense of security.
made them more open to more casual sex and therefore opened them up to the possibility of a pregnancy that they don’t know what to do about because they’re the act that created that child was so anonymous and and so meaningless to them in a way. So it’s a it was a big wake up call for me because even as a even as a social
phenomenon. Contraception doesn’t work. It certainly at reducing the number of abortions. And that’s something that John Paul the second mentioned in his encyclical on the gospel of life as well. People think it’s going to prevent it, but it can be very many times a road toward it. You had this technical thing that was supposed to prevent this.
But as a backup to contraceptive failure, you have this other technical thing that will solve the problem you didn’t think you were supposed to have.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:39)
And you know, repair of a couple of economists, Janet Yellen and her husband, right? You know this article. Yes, yes.
Richard Doerflinger (01:48)
Let’s sources, yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:51)
Basically, they were asking the question, how is it possible that in the age of contraception and abortion, both being readily available, that we have more out of wedlock childbearing than we ever did before? How is this possible? And they concluded pretty much what you just concluded, which is that the social is, contraception is the social cause. It’s not a cause like smoking causes cancer, but it’s a social cause in the sense that it sets a set of incentives into motion.
which then the net result of the whole new system that you’ve created ends up with people having pregnancies that they feel socially are not sustainable, because you’re the father of the child is your boss who’s married to someone else. And you would never have done that if you didn’t have contraception, you know, that type of thing or some schmuck you picked up at a bar, which you never would have done if you didn’t feel protected. And so the woman has a choice of either aborting the baby or carrying it to term
and being a single parent because there’s no marriage isn’t really practical. And then our friends in the crisis pregnancy center world, the pregnancy care center world, they are dealing with this issue all the time. And they would like to be able to tell the young ladies, should be, can you marry this guy? And oftentimes the answer is it would really, they couldn’t in good conscience urge the girl to marry the guy.
So there have been a whole series of consequences from the widespread promotion of sex that is not intended to be procreative, you know, if you can put it that way. Can you, from your perspective, Richard, spell out, you know, just kind of trace more of those consequences? What are some other things that have followed from the whole contraceptive ideology, the whole contraceptive mindset? What are some other…
things that you’ve documented or observed.
Richard Doerflinger (03:50)
Well, one thing, and this was the subject of Anne Maloney’s chapter in this book about, you the boys from the trenches. She’s been teaching for many years at a women’s college, Catholic women’s college. And, you know, the female students, they come there, they’re freed from their past social
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (04:03)
yes.
Richard Doerflinger (04:20)
environment from their parents and so on. And instantly you are expected to fall in with the hookup culture. their initial experience or their initial feeling is, I’m free, I’m liberated from all these restrictive norms and nobody’s watching. And I’m a liberated woman.
The sex is consequence free. Well, it’s not consequence free because what she found in talking to these young ladies over decades really is more depression, more anxiety, more cutting, cutting yourself in the arm to know you’re alive, more isolation, more abandonment, more suicidal thoughts. And they can’t figure out
why they feel so miserable. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever read. And as we as well, you know, where’s where’s the young man? Well, you know, it was one night. never talk to me again. This is a very destructive culture, destructive, especially to women, though I don’t think it’s it’s good for men either.
So it’s something you can see writ large in social findings. My friend Helen Alvarez calls it the immistration of women. That means women are more miserable than ever before. And that shows up in social surveys. And I think it does make people ready for abortion.
The other thing is that the ideology that started with contraception and then was used to create a Supreme Court judgment that there was a constitutional right not only to contraception but to abortion, I found has gotten used by later courts, by later judges, to justify the lethal neglect of handicapped newborn children to
as a precedent for euthanasia and assisted suicide for elderly. And so the whole idea that life, innocent life, supposedly burdensome life or imperfect life has no great rights that can Trump, should stop using that word, shouldn’t I, can override liberty, personal liberty.
that has gotten into any number of other areas where life is at risk. So it’s something that has been kind of poisoning society. This idea that you can have actions that are, you don’t have any actions that are consequence free. And very often the consequences are bad consequences for the most helpless among us.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (07:45)
And you know, I like the way you put that because the whole idea that there are some norms, some moral norms that have no exceptions, there’s a reason for those things having no exceptions. And the underlying reason is that you’re trying to protect the true equality of every human being and their right to life. know, so much of this has been done in the name of equality for women. Well, when they’re talking about equality for women, they’re talking about in terms of income or
occupational stature, that kind of thing. There’s no question that women make more money as individuals than they used to, or that women have more education than they used to. That’s certainly true. And so men and women are more equal. But only in that dimension. The women are now more miserable than they were before. And the idea that every human person has a baseline of human rights, that gets completely shot.
you know, that the woman has the sole right to determine whether this particular person even gets to live, you know. That idea is extremely corrosive. And it’s one of these things, it’s superficially appealing, but when you really dig down a little bit, you find there’s all sorts of dark sides to it. And, you know, it seems like it’s been the job of the faithful Catholic remnant to make sure that at least somebody digs down a little bit.
to pass that superficial appeal of the thing.
Richard Doerflinger (09:14)
Yeah, it’s a, it reminded me of something that was once written by one of my favorite priests that I ever met, Jesuit priest named John Connery SJ. And he had a steady debate going back and forth between him and Richard McCormick, who was one of the great consequentialist theologians in the United States in journals like Theological Studies. And he ended one of his articles about moral absolutes
with a statement that I thought, well, it’s so obvious that you’re the first person that wrote anything that brought it home to me. And that was, look, it’s when it’s hard to obey a moral norm, that’s when you need the moral absolute. You don’t need moral absolutes for when it’s easy. You only need it when it is
when the temptation is greater to to violate it. And I don’t know why they’re just stuck in my mind as well. It’s enormous common sense. But for some reason, there are people who think that that’s not true. The.
And the whole history of Catholic moral teaching has been to refine and sometimes to expand the application of its witness to life. You know, more and more of the church has turned against capital punishment as, you know, an unnecessarily violent means for trying to punish or stop crime.
Our tradition on war has become more and more skeptical about the idea that you could ever have in practice today with all our technology, a just war, a limited war. And so here, when life is at its most helpless, we seem to be wanting to go in the opposite direction. And I would like to say to some of my liberal Catholic friends, do you really think that once you make this new paradigm where it’s only your subjective
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:20)
Mm-hmm
Richard Doerflinger (11:29)
desires and your own experience that are going to make the moral norm for you. You don’t think anybody’s going to think of applying that to war.
I don’t see any reason why not. If it’s a paradigm, it’s a paradigm. It undermines all moral absolutes. So I think it’s very, very important to that.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:45)
Right
And it undermines all moral absolutes, but it also places the weak in an even weaker position, right, because there’s nothing to which they can appeal. The law of the strongest becomes much more potent in a relativistic type of system, and this is something Pope Benedict was, I think, referring to when he talked about the dictatorship of relativism. If you really don’t have any standards, then you are going to end up with the law of the strongest, whether you mean to or not, whether you like it or not.
that’s where you’re going to end up because you don’t have any standard that everybody can appeal to.
Richard Doerflinger (12:30)
That’s right. That’s John Paul II as well in the Gospel of Life. When liberty, when freedom does not serve the truth, it’s just a war of the strong against the weak.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (12:44)
Right, right. And that’s pretty much where we are.
Richard Doerflinger (12:47)
what
we seem to be heading for. The other thing that just surprises me is that a lot of the Protestant denominations, and this has been noted by Mary Eberstadt and others, have taken this road toward a more subjectivist, more relativist morality, accepting the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, in terms of sexuality, among other things.
And those are the denominations that are dying. know, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, at least some branches of them have decided we need to get with the spirit of the age so that people will find us credible. And instead, people found them dispensable.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (13:43)
Yes.
Richard Doerflinger (13:44)
They were just saying the things that the secular society was already telling them and wrapping it around in some theology, but you don’t need the theology if you’ve already got, you know, the answer to what you’re allowed to do, which is pretty broad answer. So it’s very frustrating to find that this, you know, sexual revolution, obviously, I mean, you have to just open your eyes had many, many casualties.
And I don’t know why that can be invisible to bishops, to theologians. The evidence is all there. again, know, Berenstead has been, and her contribution to this as well, and in yours, it’s all there.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:36)
That’s right.
Richard Doerflinger (14:37)
Question about it, really.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:40)
Well, I can tell you how this works, Richard. can tell you exactly how this works, because this is the kind of stuff I track, right? People selectively choose the evidence. And so the people who are talking about lived experience, they always have one kind of experience in mind, the experience of the hard case, whatever the hard case might be, the issue is abortion or the issue is end of life issues or
homosexuality or whatever the issue is, it’s always the hard case where it’s hard to meet the norm, like you were saying before, but they never ever present the evidence, the lived experience of the people who violated the norm and then later regret it. And the whole list of reasons why people turn out to regret violating the norm. You know, it’s like we’re driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in California, which is a beautiful winding road, but we’re driving down that highway with no guardrails.
in a car that has no brakes. Well, when you go careening off the cliff, you kind of wish you had the brakes. You kind of wish somebody had said, danger, slow down, you know? But that’s what the absolute moral norm can do for you, is it keeps you from the worst kind of catastrophe, but still give you lots and lots of freedom about how. So for example, you and your wife, I want to come back to your story, which by the way is the subject of his contribution here.
That what you discover is when you say, okay, certain things are off limits. We’re not going to use the rubbers anymore. We’re not going to take the pills anymore. Okay, that’s off limits. But within that, within the constraints we’ve now accepted for ourselves, we can do all sorts of things. We’re very free if we stay in the playground, you know, and the playground is much safer than the free for all that includes cars coming through at 50 miles an hour. You know, can, the kids can’t play in that kind of environment.
And so, but the contraceptive ideology has broken down marriage precisely as Paul VI said it would do because if you have a strong marriage culture and you know you’re supposed to be sexually exclusive, that means this ring says I’m off limits. I’m off limits to everybody, you know, and you’re off limits to everybody because you got a ring on your finger.
Richard Doerflinger (16:59)
Even the guys who are trying to cheat on their wives and go to a bar to pick up a woman they don’t know, they realize they need to take that ring off first.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (17:12)
Yeah, that’s right. No, that’s very true. That’s very true. Because there is still some residual moral norm around that you don’t mess around with somebody’s spouse. But contraception makes it seem like it will be OK, that we can get away with this. It’s not as potentially catastrophic and stuff. And how many marriages are destroyed by infidelity? A lot. A lot are destroyed by infidelity, obviously. So yeah.
Anyway, go ahead.
Richard Doerflinger (17:44)
I was just going say that, you when you’re talking about the playground, it reminded me of something that I think GK Chesterton said about there was once a playground. It was on a sort of plateau, but it has this big strong fence all around, all around the playground. And kids would come and they would play. And sometimes they, you know, when running in a ball game, they’d actually bounce off the fence or something, you know, that everybody was having a good time. Everybody decided.
Although their parents decided, well, this is very restrictive. We will take away the fence. The next day they came, the fence was down. The children arrived. They were all huddling together in the center and no one was laughing. And it reminded me also of there’s a palliative care physician I used to work with on the issue of physician assisted suicide.
said something very similar. said, because I know that deliberately ending the life of my patient is the one thing I must never do that freed me to do all of the ways to explore all the ways in which I can relieve his suffering and accompany him or her. Because I know that’s where I don’t go.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (19:09)
Mm-hmm.
Richard Doerflinger (19:10)
So I think that’s very true on all kinds of issues. You say this is what I will not do. What is it? Meet Lo, Fustasing. I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that. Those norms are there to free us for the ways in which we can live with each other and, yes, plan our families.
and respect each other. I that was one of the other things that just I had to respect my wife’s body and its natural cycles and so on. And that helped to undergird my respect for her, which, of course, every husband should have for his wife. And so it is a way of working with reality instead of trying to change reality to your whims.
I think this is a much longer term debate or struggle than just, you know, changing laws or, you know, changing official documents. It really is about changing culture. It’s about changing attitudes. I’ve done some writing in the past about this whole worldview of expressive individualism, that every one of us is just sort of a individual.
Well, it’s really, it’s very Nietzschean, you know, it’s the will to power. I express myself, I can create myself, making my identity by the way that I work out what I want to do. And that is so destructive on so many levels. And I think that the marriage culture, the idea of actually committing yourself to another person, that that is freeing. It frees you from all the consequences of
uncommitted sex that so many women have had to experience. And it is also something that, there is also you were talking about, you know, there’s a there’s a moral norm built into us, you know, instinctually, a mother has the instinct of protecting her child.
at every stage. We have been trying to suppress that over the recent decades of developments on this is what your individual freedom frees you or maybe requires you to do. I was very taken aback once I was reading a Catholic account of abortion. This is a priest who is responding to an essay by Anne Landers in favor of abortion.
And he went through all kinds of rebuttals about the arguments in favor. And then he said, but to get back to the one thing, the essential thing, the only thing to abort is to destroy your son or daughter. And I have been working with the, you know, this is the taking of a human life or this is, you know, a form of killing and so on. And suddenly just those words took me aback. Well, of course it is. You’re related.
This is a member of your family. It already is a member of your family. Even if your family is only the two of you. And I think it has taken a lot of work for society to break down that very natural intuition. And there must be ways to revive it because it hasn’t entirely disappeared. mean, many, many abortions are very broken up about it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (23:01)
Yes, yes. And many men are broken up by their wives or girlfriends’ decisions to have an abortion. And even siblings. Every once in a while somebody will share with me, you know, Dr. Morse, my mom told me when I was a teenager, my mom told me that she had had an abortion, you know, at some point. And that guy said to me, my gosh, I have a sibling who died, you know.
So even there, none of these things only affect the individual. This is the other big myth, you know. The person making the decision cannot foresee all the consequences if you, particularly if you expand the consequences beyond yourself. What impact will this have on the people around me, on my husband, on my boyfriend, on my other kids, you know?
What are all those consequences? This has always been the argument against consequentialism. You know, no, I mean, it’s one argument against consequentialism. You can’t possibly know all the possible consequences.
Richard Doerflinger (24:12)
And there’s no way to quantify one against the other because they’re different projects. And the first consequence is on you. I you have just made yourself the kind of person who does this. And I mean, there’s certainly opportunity for repenting of that, for turning your life around again. But the first consequence is on your own conscience.
There are people who, you this was the first time they realized they were capable of doing this thing that they didn’t think they would ever do. And that changes your life. it’s, yeah, consequentialism is, it’s a very one dimensional way of talking about one very small subset of all the consequences that we create when we have a human act, a moral act.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (25:10)
Yes, yes. And I’m glad you’re calling it expressive individualism, because one of the… I almost think of it as a trick. You know, one of the tricks that is done to make you think this act is okay is that you greatly redefine what counts as a consequence. You know, so when you see people expressing themselves by deciding they were really born in the wrong body, and they’re going to change the sex of the body, and they’re going to leave their wife and their children to go live as a woman…
You know, that person’s thinking about the consequences to themselves. They’re not thinking about the long-term impact on the wife and the children. Somehow that doesn’t enter the calculation. It doesn’t enter as a harm, you know? And that’s how a lot of this stuff is done. That’s the trick, I would call it the trick. And one of the things that we try to do here at the Ruth Institute is to make sure those people get a microphone, you know, that the people who’ve been left behind have an opportunity to say, you know, my dad did this and it was awful.
My mom did this and it was awful for us, you know, all of those type of things to broaden that discussion so that people understand your actions do have far reaching consequences, not just to you today, but to generations down the line. You’re gonna be having consequences, the consequences of these acts. So we have our work cut out for us in this volume, us little, our intrepid people who are trying to fight against consequentialism in the Roman Catholic Church.
where it doesn’t belong, okay people, it does not belong in the Roman Catholic Church. The rest of you maybe have an excuse, but no, we’re not gonna accept this. So in your opinion, who should read this book? Who should get this book? Who should have it on their shelf?
Richard Doerflinger (26:55)
You know, I think it would be a very handy guide for pastors who, you know, deal with people coming to them with questions regarding sexuality and so on. know, people will not necessarily always listen to, well, that this is immoral in the teaching of the Catholic Church. They might listen to, well, I mean, what you’re doing or what you want to do.
has really done a lot of harm to a lot of women and a lot of men. And here’s some experience. I mean, if people will listen to experience, this book has got those. I think people who are teaching moral theology or are teaching marriage preparation or RCIA, Pre-Kena programs,
can look at this and get some insights that will help them to talk in a very down to earth way about sexual ethics. I mean, I have a vested interest, I would, you know, I hope everybody reads this book, of course, but I think especially in those consequences, you know, in those situations, it could be an extremely helpful guide for where to go when just saying no is not enough.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (28:19)
Right, right. And do you think people would respond well if they received this book as a gift from someone else? I wonder if some of our viewers might want send it to their pastor, might want to send it to their moral theologian professor or something like that. I don’t know. Maybe people don’t respond well to that. But maybe they do. Maybe. I don’t know. What do you think, Rich? Should people try that?
Richard Doerflinger (28:46)
It couldn’t hurt. The one person I know I should not send it to. I was talking to one of our grown daughters the other day and said, you know, Maria, I just finished, you know, I got a chapter in a recently published book. We were talking about, you know, moms and my married life in our checkered history with family planning. You want to read it? She said, God, no.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:15)
That’s it.
Richard Doerflinger (29:18)
So, you know, your kids don’t want to.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:20)
Send it to her. Duly noted, Richard. We will not send it to your daughter.
Richard Doerflinger (29:26)
But I hope other people will be sort of interested in what we learned from our experience.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:33)
Yes. And the strategic significance of this book, just to reiterate something that Rich and I started at and have been kind of hinting around about, is that lived experience is the terminology that people use to defend consequentialism. Lived experience can trump those moral norms. And we want to say that it’s actually the lived experience of people who violate those norms that should tell us that the norms are very valuable to us.
and that the norms are worth defending and the norms are worth keeping. Richard Dorflinger, thank you so much for being my guest on today’s episode of the Dr. J Show. This has been very interesting, very, very helpful. Are you still writing and working in this series or do you have a website or something like that where people can keep up with you?
Richard Doerflinger (30:25)
I don’t have a website. mean, if you were to do an internet search in my name, some of my work would come up. Also, some nasty articles about me from people who didn’t appreciate what I was doing in Congress. my wife is asking me once in a while when I’m going to retire from my retirement. I continue to do writing and speaking.
giving a talk at Notre Dame next week, part of their fall conference on the Catholic imagination, which is interesting, is they wanted me to apply the idea of the Catholic imagination, the Catholic worldview and how it looks at reality as having deeper levels than other accounts recognized and apply it to some of these issues like abortion. so
So it’s mainly, a lot of the speakers are gonna be novelists, poets and so on, but I get to take that idea and apply it to what I work on usually. And it’s been an interesting exercise to figure out what I’m gonna say. I haven’t figured out all of it yet.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (31:44)
Well, Richard Darflinger, it has been a lot of fun talking with you about these issues, these very serious and important issues, but we have had a little bit of fun while we’re doing it. I do hope that people will take this volume seriously. I do hope that people will use these thoughts to interpret what you see coming out of Rome from time to time and help you understand what some of these debates are in Catholic moral theology. Your contribution here, Richard, has been really a big help to me and I’m sure to many of the viewers of the Ruth Institute. So I want to thank you so
much for being my guest on today’s episode of The Dr. J Show.
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