ABSTRACT
Professor Elizabeth Anscombe explicates the concepts of act and intention and constructs a powerful though somewhat intricate defence of Catholic rulings on birth control understood as contraception. The characteristic which Anscombe believes makes all contraceptive sex acts condemnable is as follows: in contraception the sexual act has been altered on purpose, by something done at the time, or before, or afterwards, in such a way as to make it into a different kind of action, one that embodies the intention of avoiding conception. The Church allows that conception may be avoided by married couples ‘for grave reasons’, either by abstinence or by the use of safe period sex. Human sexual acts can be classified as either normal or deviant. Normal sex acts regarded just as physical acts are intrinsically generative; deviant sexual acts regarded just as physical acts are intrinsically non-generative.
