A few years back, I had the unexpected opportunity to write for CNN’s In America Blog on the topic of the HHS mandate and my response as a Catholic woman. This paved the way for me to (at least virtually) meet Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill, and I’ve been watching her cause gain momentum since then.

Grigg-Spall’s blog — now also a book, and hopefully soon a documentary — articulates a discomfort with the prevalence of hormonal contraception that stems not from any religious or moral grounds, but rather her own personal experience of and subsequent study of the history and negative impacts of the Pill and other forms of hormonal contraception.

Along the way, she discovered the idea of fertility awareness, and now considers it empowering for women to embrace their bodies’ natural cycles. This is where our views converge: We both seem to believe that women should be accepted as women in society, and not feel pressured to suppress or change something so intrinsic to us as our fertility cycles in order to fit in. We also both seem to believe that every woman has a right to understand how her body works, and that that information has too long taken a back seat to pro-Pill propaganda.

Frankly, I don’t see eye-to-eye with Grigg-Spall on everything, and I’m sure I’m not going to agree with all the conclusions that the Sweetening the Pill (STP) documentary draws. Still, I strongly believe it is a conversation that needs to happen in the public square, and for that reason I have a lot of respect for Grigg-Spall and the whole Sweetening the Pill team. I encourage readers to support their Kickstarter campaign to ensure this documentary gets off the ground. (There are only 6 days left in the campaign, so please check it out as soon as possible!)

Interestingly enough, Slate DoubleX contributor Amanda Marcotte seems to hate the thought of this documentary. In her words in her post, “Ricki Lake Starts a Crusade Against Hormonal Birth Control,” “the human ability to manipulate nature and extract what we want out of it is the defining feature of our species” — and apparently Grigg-Spall, Lake, and director Abby Epstein aren’t adequately toeing the line. They are, from Marcotte’s standpoint, suggesting that hormonal contraceptives have caused harm that could be avoided by using other, more natural methods. And nature, to Marcotte, is something to be despised, manipulated and conquered.

But the point of my post isn’t whether Marcotte accurately represents the aims of the STP documentary (she doesn’t), nor how much I really want to see the STP documentary happen (I do). Rather, my point is that Marcotte offers an unsurprising but strikingly clear articulation of a worldview that I believe is behind much of today’s so-called progress:

“The human ability to manipulate nature and extract what we want out of it is the defining feature of our species.”

There is truth to her statement — even Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si, acknowledges that, “The modification of nature for useful purposes has distinguished the human family from the beginning” and applauds technological progress that has “remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings” (102).

But while humanity’s capacity for progress and modification of nature can be laudable, the Pope does not blindly stop there, as Marcotte seems to, but rather cautions that progress without respect for life and nature, without wisdom, without humility, has the capacity to create a world in which might makes right, with dire consequences.

“Creation is harmed,” he writes, quoting his predecessor, Benedict XVI, “‘where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves'” (6).

I can’t help but hear the whisper of the Serpent from Genesis in Marcotte’s oversimplification of humanity’s abilities. “You will be like God,” he urges. “See what goodness and delight are at your fingertips — see what knowledge you can grasp!”

My hunch is that Marcotte, like many today, would prefer to forget that as created beings, we are subject to laws and norms that by default govern the use of our freedom (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 396). I think that’s why she reacts so strongly against Sweetening the Pill, and in particular its emphasis on the harms caused by hormonal contraception and its promotion of body and fertility awareness. Those factors are reminders that our power to change nature is in fact not without limits.