Pharmacies across the United States are expected to begin stocking Opill, an over-the-counter birth control pill that will be available without a prescription. Oral birth control will now be easily available. However, in a progressive consumerist culture like the United States that is often quick to champion such “achievements,” it is important to examine the negative impact Opill might have.

The popular culture’s embrace of birth control and foisting of these technologies on increasingly younger people has had disastrous effects on the relationship between the sexes and the expression of love, romance and courtship in our society.

What contraceptives do by nature is not simply regulate pregnancy but sterilize the sexual act; it disrupts the giving of one partner to the other and creates an environment where the human body becomes a vessel of pleasure divorced from purpose, which is pregnancy and romantic union.

When the sexual act is sterilized, it empowers reckless sex on the part of both parties and trivializes an act of romance, rendering it transactional. When oral contraceptives are made readily available, potentially to teenagers and preteens, a generation will be raised where sex has so little meaning and consequence. The poetry of young love dies.

The way men and women look at each other is changed intrinsically because the romantic chase is hastily tossed aside as a relic of antiquity. No more playful innocent stares, no more love letters and no more expressions of chivalry, manly honor or womanly virtue. All that remains is the mashing together of bodies, a pleasure without purpose.

Outside of how the availability of oral contraceptives can change the relationship between men and women, it is important to consider the associated health risks of oral birth control. It is increasingly discussed among health professionals that there appears to be a serious causal relationship between the usage of oral birth control and risks of depression in the first two years of use.

A Cambridge study found a high increase in the risk of developing depression during use and an increased risk for young teens later in life, even if they got off the medication.

The culture must contend with a serious question: what of virtue and what of love? What is easy access to the pill but a license to allow a romantic partner to treat a woman’s body as a vessel for pleasure rather than a temple of her heart?

It is abundantly clear that Generation Z is a generation suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and depression. What is sorely needed is a commitment to love and a return to virtue.

A culture that cannibalizes itself and refuses to procreate cannot survive.

Gen Z and future generations deserve partners that don’t use their bodies for pleasure, but instead see Heaven in their eyes and desire to cherish them. How can the United States hope to build a society of virtue when its citizens don’t even respect themselves enough to not sacrifice their lovers and children on the altar of progress and the grave of the Marquis de Sade?