Contraception: Why Not? (part 22)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Coronation of Mary

Married couples are meant to represent the marriage of Christ and his Church.  Christ is the bridegroom, the Church is the bride.  Couples are meant to symbolize for the rest of us the devotion, the love, the commitment, the unconditional laying down of your life for your bride, which Christ, the bridegroom did for Mary and for the Church, his bride.  It’s an incredible thing.  It’s an incredible responsibility and one not accomplished by the 50 to 60 percent of the marriages in our culture that end in divorce.  When I meet couples who have been married for 15 years or longer, I want to thank them.  They’ve done something good for all of us.  For their children, for each other, and for all if us.  Divorce is hard on everyone; it is hard for the couple, for their children, and for the rest of us to see all that goes on.  When we think of what it takes to have a marriage last, we realize it is very difficult.   The spouses need to learn to forgive and to ask forgiveness.  They need to learn to put up with disappointment both in their spouses and in themselves. It’s hard to when we are a disappointment to ourselves. I think that happens a lot in marriage.  We want to be better than we are and we are not.  And our faults cause a lot of trouble for other people.  People who have been married for 15 years or longer have done a lot of the hard work it takes to get along in this world.  I believe the rewards are great for such dedication; that the satisfaction they experience is incredibly deep.  I hope that they are incredibly in love with each other and it just gets better all the time.  My parents have been married, as I said, for 60 years.  I think they are happier and more in love now than they’ve ever been.  They are reaping the rewards of a life that was well lived.  Let’s stop there and get some questions in.

Q. How would you address the misuse of NFP to control family size for selfish reasons?

A. Some people say that couples using NFP can use it just as selfishly as couples who are contracepting.  I think that’s possible, but I’m going to actually argue that natural family planning is the solution to the problem.

Let me explain.  Let’s consider two couples who both want to control their family size.  Both have been married several years.  Let’s say that they may have 3 children under 5, and want to wait awhile before they have another child.  They are tired and need some time to work on household organization, etc.  One couple decides to use contraception and the other couple decides to use natural family planning.  Are they doing the same thing?  While both couples have the same goal, they are using different means to achieve their goals.

The Church teaches that you not only have to have a good goal, and controlling your family size can be a good goal, you have to have a good means to that goal.  I think contraception, again, violates a woman’s health.  It’s a barrier between the spouses.  It’s a rejection of God, etc.  Natural family planning couples are living in accord with God’s plan.  Very importantly – they are having to deny themselves, and it is a very good thing to be able to deny yourself in pursuit of other goods.  Let’s consider two individuals who both need to lose weight, one engages in bulimia – in eating and throwing up, because that person wants the pleasure of food without the consequence.   Another individual diets.  That denies him or herself cake, ice cream, etc, because he or she is seeking a good, which is weight loss.  Through that self-denial, that dieter is probably going to rise in self-esteem, feel better about him or herself, have more self-control, probably enjoy food more than the bulimic person.

The couple who is using natural family planning is like the dieter, the contracepting couple are like a bulimic person.  The NFP couple appreciates the goodness of sex but refrains from fertile sex until they are prepared to have another child. The contracepting couple treats fertility as a great annoyance if not a bad thing and they are determined to have sexual pleasure without the consequences. They are engaging in an act and as they engage in it are trying to undo the consequences of it.

The couple using NFP treat the fertile period of the woman’s cycle somewhat like sacred ground. They revere it and will not enter that sacred space until they are prepared to accept the gift of a child.  If it is not a good idea for them to have a child at some time, they won’t engage in an action that amounts to inviting God to send them a child and at the same time rejecting that invitation.  NFP means that a couple is going to have sex during the infertile times and not during the fertile times.  Remember, there is no obligation to have sex during the fertile times.  If there is no obligation to have sex, those who are not having sex during the fertile times are not doing something wrong by not having sex during those times.  Remember that it is perfectly all right to have sex during the infertile days.  So a couple is doing nothing wrong in having sex during the infertile days.  We all know that couples don’t have sex for a lot of reasons, headaches, sporting events they want to watch on TV, visitors in the house.  Now if it’s okay not to have sex because you had a headache, or you want to watch a sporting event, or you have visitors in the house, it’s okay not to have sex because it’s not a good idea to have a child.  That’s a good reason.

Couples who teach natural family planning say a lot of people coming to them have no more openness to life than those who are contraceptive.  They just are sick and tired of the bad physical side effects.  But in using natural family planning they start to have more respect for their fertility.  They start to have more respect for each other.  They start to appreciate fertility as a gift.  And some of them will have more children and some of them won’t.  But they have a whole different appreciation of their fertility.  That suggests that NFP is a cure for using natural family planning selfishly.  Abstention is difficult.  When people want to have sex, they want to have sex.  If they don’t have a good reason for not having sex, it is difficult for them to abstain.  As they discuss their reasons for abstaining, they often discover whether they are being selfish or unselfish in their decision not to have a child.  So NFP has in internal mechanism for helping spouses realize their selfishness if in fact they are being selfish.

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