The birth rate in many industrialized countries has fallen well below replacement level, while people complain that the house next door is now occupied by a Muslim family. Governments worry about how fewer young people will support an aging population. In many circles parents, especially fathers, spend on average only a few minutes a day conversing with their children. Forms of juvenile delinquency and alienation that used to be associated with marginalised people who supposedly neglected their children are showing up with alarming frequency in "good families". In some of those families the parents may be neglectful. In others the general cultural atmosphere is at fault. While writing this chapter I have seen several newspaper reports of objections to maternity leave unless non-parents get equivalent benefits. Maternity leave was introduced originally because the special contribution of mothers to society needed to be supported and encouraged, but it seems that now in some circles that contribution is ignored. A development within the American Catholic Church in less than two decades illustrates the change in attitude. The 1960's saw the beginning of visible opposition by Roman Catholics to the Church's ban on contraception. At that point people talked mainly of allowing it in hard cases. By 1977 a book commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America devoted a section to "child-free" marriage,380 by which it meant marriages in which the partners from the beginning decide not to have children. They noted that a majority of Catholics polled did not disapprove of such a choice. More revealing was the choice of term to describe the phenomenon. In expressions in which a hyphen is followed by "free", the first word normally indicates something bad: germ-free operating rooms, pollution-free environments, smoke-free eating areas, crime-free neighbourhoods ... and child-free marriages. This surely represents a considerable journey down the road that began modestly with the suggestion that contraception in urgent cases might be allowed so long as the marriage as a while remained procreative.
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See Kosnik, Anthony, Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, New York, Paulist Press, c.1977, pp. 140 & ff.
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