Catholic Cherie Blair defends her use of contraception

A brief dip into the UK tabloids, where Catholic Cherie Blair defends her use of contraception. Local press thinks she's talking about this sort of stuff to sell her recently released memoirs.

The international press, however, has at times been quick to see this as a case of a high-level dissent, when actually it strikes me rather more as a case of ordinary ignorance and uncaring:

Former British prime minister Tony Blair's wife Cherie has defended her use of contraception despite calling herself a "good Catholic girl".

Mrs Blair, whose husband coverted to Catholicism after leaving office last June, made the comments after she revealed in a new book how her fourth child was conceived accidentally, during a holiday with teh Queen.

"People seem to be quite shocked that perhaps a Catholic girl even uses contraception,'' she told GMTV television.

"But it is really an important thing for women .. One of the reasons women's lives have changed is that they have been able to control their fertility, it is an important issue."

In her just-published autobiography, Speaking for Myself, Mrs Blair describes how the birth of the couple's last child Leo followed a visit to the queen's Balmoral Scottish residence in 1999.

She tells how she had not packed her "contraceptive equipment'' because the previous year it had embarrassingly been discovered, unpacked along with a "range of unmentionables''.

"As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another... but then, I thought, I can't be. I'm too old. It must be the menopause,'' she said. (source)

Spare me. This is a classic example of the "it's just common sense" defense of contraception.

Her husband Tony Blair has also publicly held several positions contrary to the Church's teaching.