President Lyndon Baines Johnson had spoken the words "Great
Society" before, but on Jan. 4, 1965, he brought the pieces
together as a legislative package for Congress. His State of
the Union message stirred a remarkable flurry of
congressional activity that in short order produced major new
programs in civil rights, health care and anti-poverty.
In the half-century since then, the Great Society and its
offspring have made profound changes in American society. A
huge increase in government-sponsored family planning at home
and abroad is one of these. Fifty years later, it's worth
considering how church leadership responded at the start, not
just as a history lesson but for the light it sheds on the
church's response to the growing federal embrace now of
things like abortion and same-sex marriage.
My principal source is a book called Intended
Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal
Government by historian Donald T. Critchlow. The
heavily-documented volume, published in 1999 by Oxford
University Press, has information otherwise not readily
available on crucial events in the not so distant Catholic
past.
Pressure for government birth control was rising before LBJ.
Although President Dwight Eisenhower had famously remarked
that he could think of nothing less appropriate for
government involvement than family planning, private
conversations on the matter took place during the Kennedy
administration.
Meanwhile the population lobby labored to win Catholic
support. An important part of this effort was a series of
conferences from 1963 to 1967 at the University of Notre
Dame, with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations paying and
attendance by foundation people, population groups and church
organizations. Critchlow writes: "Both sides knew what they
wanted: a liberal forum to create an oppositional voice
within the Catholic Church on the issue of family planning."
Johnson came to the presidency determined to make birth
control an integral part of his War on Poverty. Congress
agreed. But LBJ, canny politician that he was, feared a
Catholic backlash if he moved too fast on the domestic front
and therefore stressed family planning to fight the
much-ballyhooed "population explosion" abroad. Quiet
expansion of existing welfare and health programs was to be
the tactic at home.
Two administration Catholics - presidential aide Joseph
Califano and Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent
Shriver - were given the job of cultivating the Catholic
hierarchy, especially its Washington-based organization, the
National Catholic Welfare Conference, predecessor of today's
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
A key moment occurred in early 1966 when the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services)
for the first time issued guidelines for family planning
grants to the states. The NCWC administrative board responded
with a statement protesting "threats to free choice of
spouses." But an NCWC official privately assured Califano
this was only "the last trumpet of the older American
bishops."
The White House then concluded that non-coercive family
planning was acceptable to the hierarchy. The following year
brought expanded support for birth control abroad, along with
Social Security amendments for the first time authorizing
grants to private groups like Planned Parenthood - a
breakthrough long sought by the population lobby.
By the time Johnson announced he wouldn't seek reelection in
1968, federal funding of family planning was in the
multi-millions and rising fast. And the bishops, Critchlow
writes, had "tacitly" agreed to accept federal birth control,
provided it was "noncoercive." It's unlikely they could have
prevented what happened - public opinion, including Catholic
opinion, was against them - but they might have gotten a
better deal. Is there a lesson here today as Obamacare
abortion grows?
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author
of American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall,
and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius
Press).