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1. What Makes the Conjugal Act Unitive
It is an extraordinary fact that right down to our days there has been so little attempt to analyze and put in clear light what it is that turns sexual intercourse into a unique expression of conjugal love and self-giving. The formidable and widespread contraceptive movement of the last century, with its pretense that the conjugal act is fully and singularly expressive of marital love and union even if its procreative orientation is artificially excluded, forced a deeper anthropological analysis of why this is simply not so.
The procreative design of the conjugal act is evident and undeniable. The contraceptive movement proposes various physical or chemical ways to cancel or negate this procreative design, claiming at the same time that this can be done without in any way rendering the act less expressive of the unique relationship of the partners as husband and wife (i.e., less an act of spousal union).
Elsewhere I have examined the inherent fallacy of this contraceptive argument.[77] What makes intercourse between spouses a unique expression of distinctive conjugal union is precisely the sharing in their mutual complementary procreative power. If the procreative orientation of the act is deliberately frustrated through contraception, then it no longer unites the spouses in any distinctively conjugal way. It is no longer the conjugal act - the most distinctive physical expression of full mutual surrender and permanent loving union. It is in fact no longer a sexual act in any true human sense, for there is no actual sexual intercourse or communication. The spouses refuse true carnal converse with one another, each rather using the other's body for pleasure. But a mere exchange together of pleasure neither expresses nor achieves spousal union, for there is nothing in that pleasure that draws a person out of his or her solitude and draws each into a greater oneness with the other. This refusal of union, this voluntary remaining in solitariness, tends inexorably to the separation of the spouses. Contraception may be mutually gratifying but is no way unifying, tending rather to shut each spouse off in individual satisfaction. Hence it is not wholly exaggerated to speak of it as a mutual experience of solitary sex.[78]