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December 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The continually unfolding epidemic of sexual harassment and sexual abuse is owed in part to the proliferation of contraception, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote last week.

Noonan explained in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece what popes have predicted and practicing Catholics have witnessed over the last four decades of exploding acceptance of the birth control pill – that when sexual intercourse is separated from its life-giving aspect, men will objectify women, making abuse inevitable.

“Once you separate sex from its seriousness, once you separate it from its life-changing, life-giving potential,” Noonan said, “men will come to see it as just another want, a desire like any other.”

“Once they think that, then they’ll see sexual violations as less serious, less charged, less full of weight,” she wrote. “They’ll be more able to rationalize. It’s only petty theft, a pack of chewing gum on the counter, and I took it.”

In her Thanksgiving op-ed, Noonan explored the sex abuse crisis that’s been rocking Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and places beyond for months.

In it, she said she was thankful that investigative reporting trends have resulted in more background in the varying accusations being unearthed, allowing for deeper insight than a simple “he said/she said” assessment.

Noonan also posited that some good journalistic work is being done in both uncovering instances of sexual abuse and examining response to them. She also examined how responses can vary depending on who is accused.

Sexual harassment is nothing new, Noonan noted, citing quarter-century-old scenarios, and a recent Quinnipiac poll said nearly two-thirds of U.S. women have experienced it.

More recent testimonies suggest it is perhaps “weirder, stranger, more brutish” than before, she said, but ultimately it’s merely how things play out that has changed.

She also pointed out that sexual harassment is the product of human sin.

“Sexual harassment is not over because sin is not over,” she wrote, adding, “The devil has been busy!” a journalist friend said this week as another story broke.”

Noonan referenced a recent conversation she had illustrating the damage wrought by the contraceptive divorce of sex from its purpose as God intends.

“An aging Catholic priest suggested to a friend that all this was inevitable,” wrote Noonan. “Contraception degenerates men,” he said, as does abortion.”

The Catholic Church teaches that the purpose of the marital act is procreative and unitive. When those two aspects are intentionally separated, as with artificial contraception, the openness to life is blocked and God is removed from the embrace, demeaning both husband and wife.

Blessed Pope Paul VI predicted in Humanae Vitae that acceptance of contraception would “lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.”

Paul VI also wrote in Humanae Vitae:

“Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

Pope Pius XI also forecast in 1930 in his encyclical Casti Connubii that moral decay would result from separating sex from God’s plan:

“ … The Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her, in order that she may preserve the chastity of the nuptial union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims anew: any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.”

Pro-life and family advocates and others have chronicled for years specifics of how the late popes’ predictions have come to pass, citing domestic violence, human trafficking, pornography, sexual harassment, assault, abuse, divorce, government coercion of population control, and the overall demeaning of women.

Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae was promulgated just as the birth control pill was coming into prominence in the U.S. in the 1960s.

As contraception spread, so did fornication, adultery and divorce, a Church Militant report said.

Another byproduct of the moral decline brought on by contraception — abortion — was ramping up during the advent of contraception, with more than a dozen U.S. states legalizing abortion between 1967 and 1972. Since the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, some 60 million lives have been ended in the womb via abortion.

Former Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher summed it up aptly a 1968 symposium.

“We find that when an abortion is easily obtainable, contraception is neither actively nor diligently used,” Guttmacher said. “Abortion on demand relieves the husband of all possible responsibility; he simply becomes a coital animal.”

Noonan added to her analogy of men viewing sexual harassment as petty theft of gum. “In time this will seem true not only to men, but to women.”

That further degradation of women was another reason she said she was thankful for the collective “no” signified by all of the allegations coming to light.

“This is important,” Noonan said. “It is serious.”