Birth control dialogue needed

By Matt Meyerhofer

Last week, University President Paul Locatelli, S.J., sat down with the editors of The Santa Clara for a conversation about a variety of university issues.

The information they gleaned was what you'd probably expect: interest in promoting campus diversity, concern over student alcohol abuse, reaffirming Santa Clara football as a dead-letter issue, and reiterating the university's opposition to birth control available on campus. None of these official positions are surprising, but the way Locatelli approached one of the issues is cause for some concern.

Locatelli reportedly drew an analogy between preventing unwanted pregnancy and other more mundane health concerns. "We don't hand out toothpaste for cavities," were his words.

Now, rather than giving into the progressive-minded impulse to attack this statement as both inept and insensitive (an impulse to which I freely admit), let's give it a charitable interpretation.

It's true that the university doesn't involve itself with every health-concern and lifestyle choice facing students. It is feasible that the university could defend its decision not to hand out birth control on these grounds.

However, the fact of the matter is that university officials do not oppose birth control for these reasons. They refuse to administer birth control on moral and religious grounds that are derived from Santa Clara's Jesuit, Catholic tradition and its membership in the Roman Catholic Church.

Locatelli's answers to The Santa Clara, however, sidestep this issue entirely. They signal a desire to avoid even entering into religious or moral dialogue over the matter.

Locatelli's reasons for avoidance aren't ill-intentioned. In fact, they're very understandable. The university's refusal to dispense birth control is exceedingly unpopular and past criticism has tended to be disparaging rather than constructive.

Besides that, Santa Clara occupies a place in a religious hierarchy, and consequentially, Locatelli doesn't have absolute freedom to set policy.

Therefore, in light of the fundamental, apparently unbridgeable differences between those who set the policy and those who feel its reach, it is easy to see why one might simply conclude that the best decision is to brush off the debate as casually as possible.

And if we were dealing with a corporation seeking to implement a policy to its employees, or even a governmental agency seeking to implement a policy in a particular industry, this line of reasoning might get some (limited) mileage.

But at a Jesuit liberal arts college, any effort to sidestep moral dialogue is antithetical to the educational purposes that institution seeks to promote.

To bring the argument even closer to home, Santa Clara undermines its own commitment to instilling Jesuit-inspired Catholic ideals in its student body if it will not engage students in a real discussion over why those Jesuit-inspired ideas propel university officials to act the way they do.

In the end, the "practical outcomes" of a real discussion may be nil. The university will stick to its policy, and most students will remain dissatisfied.

But at least students will know why the university chooses to implement certain policies and not others. They will grapple with the ethical choices and the moral theories at stake, rather than resent the institution that issues edicts from on high.

This movement from "speak-to" to "speak-with" is exactly the sort of progression that moves conflicts out of the realm of bitterness and into the realm of conversation.

Or to put it more simply, it is ethics really at work.

Matt Meyerhofer is an English and philosophy double major.