Questioning NFP

Recently, a commenter on one of my NFP posts wrote (my emphases throughout this post):

Holy cow. I can't believe it. Someone is actually daring to question NFP, the "good and moral" Catholic birth control. It's about time!!!!

Yes, indeed; since I first started writing about NFP in a way that questioned the mainstream perspective, I noticed that NFP was something of a “sacred cow”.

The above commenter notes that she and her husband learned NFP in pre-Cana classes, and, before their marriage, she discovered problems with her cycles. An OB’s determination was that she would be unable to have children naturally.

I was crushed! We had originally planned to use NFP for a year or two to "get used" to being married and to get on our feet financially. However, since I didn't think we could have kids, we dropped the thought and just lived... Then we got pregnant two months after the wedding. We had a beautiful baby girl.

Shortly after she was born, I got pregnant again, then miscarried. It was at this time that my Protestant mother-in-law pleaded with me to use birth control because it would be unhealthy to get pregnant again so soon after a miscarriage. I told her we wouldn't do that, but were considering NFP. Her response? "Oh! So you have Catholic birth control? Great!"

This statement bothered me a lot and started my journey. I read every Church statement from the past that I could get my hands on regarding fertility and marriage and children. I read about prudence and God's Providence. I read all the NFP books that I had. I watched an episode of EWTN's "NFP: Embracing the Marital Gift."

My conclusion was that I could never, in good conscience, use NFP. I know the Church has approved it and encourages it- but it's not doctrine and those teachings can change. I am free to disagree... and I do. I refer to NFP as a current trend in the Church.

That’s right. The use of NFP is not “doctrine” and there is no Church document that requires couples to use it or even learn it. Unfortunately, there are NFP proponents who refuse to allow any questioning of the use of NFP. Our current commenter adds:

I mentioned my reading and thoughts and- WOW- people get VERY ANGRY when you start messing with their "approved" method of spacing children… It got pretty ugly and I lost almost every single college friend over this. They thought I had lost my mind. People – good people – who I had looked up to, hurt me pretty badly. All because I dared to question the morality of NFP.

I have heard a similar story from at least one other reader of this blog, and I have experienced it myself. Even medical professionals experience it. One doctor who specializes in fertility issues told me that in his speaking engagements

…I always come to a discussion of NFP. Then I sound like a politician (both for it and against it). That has developed to avoid the open warfare when I say that over-reliance on NFP as a means of preventing pregnancy is as bad as contraception itself.

Heck, I’ve been criticized even by people who have not read what I’ve written! For instance, when Steve Koob of One More Soul invited me to be on his radio show, he let some NFP professionals know that he was interviewing me. One of these professionals said:

My comment is that [Dr. Boyd] is heretical, i.e., contrary to Church teaching. But I have not read the book. Not sure it would be worth the time…

Way to be open-minded! He hadn’t read my book, but was pretty sure it was heretical, and wasn’t sure it would be worth the time to read it and find out for sure!

Another NFP professional said:

From the brief look at the blog, the protagonist appears to be partly a providentialist (God will provide, period) and partly has a residue of Janssenism (sex is basically sinful and has to be redeemed by procreation) couples are free to practice NFP or not, but they are not free not to practice responsible parenthood… Let’s not revive the controversy about grave vs. serious reasons for avoiding more children… that’s been done.

I’m not even going to attempt to dissect that one. A third professional opined:

What troubles me is that writings like hers get good coverage and play at conservative Catholic Web sites.

All righty, then.

Now, here’s the question that is gnawing away in my brain: why are these people so invested in NFP? It’s a dilemma. For instance, one of the NFP professionals even noted:

…It still irritates me that NFP teachers and the practice of NFP is called to question -- with only .1% of current couples using NFP and maybe .2% of Catholic couples - is NFP really the problem?

That estimate of NFP users is much lower than the 2-5% I’ve heard bandied about! And even if it were 5%, I have previously opined that NFP isn’t really the problem; in my post “The Saving Grace of NFP” I wrote:

Oh, I still believe there are problems with the over-use and justification of NFP, as well as problems with the way NFP is presented and promoted… But those problems are reflective of an underlying philosophy that is having a sad effect on our Church: the contraceptive mentality of society today. It’s that contraceptive mentality that leads many Catholics to use artificial contraception.

…There is a contraceptive mentality behind NFP, and that is a problem. That contraceptive mentality is there despite all the protestations to the contrary.

Now, the phrase “contraceptive mentality” generally throws NFP advocates into a fit. By this term I mean: a) society’s general acceptance of the necessity of limiting family size for a variety of reasons, generally through the use of artificial contraception; and b) the general acceptance – and even expectation – of the use of artificial contraception by young unmarried women in order to prevent pregnancy when these women engage in premarital sex (which also seems to be expected).  I do think that society’s general outlook on contraception has influenced the use and promotion of NFP; it’s just that NFP is not contraception per se.

So I have softened the blow in other posts by suggesting we just call it a “birth control” mentality. There can be no doubt that NFP is birth control. NFP promoters talk about “taking control of our fertility”; there is talk about “spacing” births; there is the option of using NFP to increase the likelihood of pregnancy. These are all about controlling the number of births that a couple might experience.

I believe the “birth control” mentality is a problem, because it perpetuates the myth of overpopulation and the need for “responsible” parenthood, and tends to overemphasize the importance of the marital act in the marriage relationship.

That still doesn’t answer the question of why NFP advocates and promoters become so angry and defensive when anyone disagrees with them, though. Perhaps the answer is that questioning the use of NFP means questioning the false sense of autonomy many Catholics have with regard to “forming one’s conscience”. Many Catholics talk about conscience, but few understand that one’s conscience must be properly formed according to the teachings of the Church. It’s the improper formation of conscience that has led many Catholics to accept artificial contraception, homosexual marriage, and even abortion with no qualms. And it is “conscience” on which NFP users rely when deciding whether or not they think God wants them to have another child.

Further, I suggest that the failure to correctly understand conscience flows from the personalist and existentialist notions that have crept into the minds of Catholics by way of some of the verbiage used in various Vatican II and post-Vatican II documents – verbiage that suggests that saying “I prayed about it, and I feel it’s right” is the only justification needed for one’s actions. That’s called moral relativism.

Questioning NFP means questioning a lot of things. It means questioning why we teach girls that having a career should come before having children; why gender roles are down-played so much these days; why sex is so over-valued in our society. And I’ll bet you can think of more “why’s”…

In other words, questioning NFP means questioning the whole middle-class lifestyle that has evolved in the US. That can be a bit threatening, I suppose.

The Saving Grace of NFP

A thought occurred to me as I was thinking over my recent blog posts on NFP and the problems I see with it. The thought is this: there are not very many Catholic couples using NFP.

Remember the big brouhaha over Nancy Pelosi’s (and others’) statement that “98% of Catholic women use contraception”? There have been all sorts of articles and comments about why that figure is wrong. Frankly, I don’t think it matters whether or not the figure is 98%. Whatever the true percentage, it’s still high, and it’s about the same for women whether they are Catholic or Protestant. The point is, there are a whole lot of Catholic women using artificial contraception.

Because of the media interest in the issues raised by the HHS contraception mandate, there have appeared a few news articles on NFP, both in the secular press and in the Catholic blogosphere. We’ve heard about how NFP is “not Catholic contraception”, how NFP is licit, how NFP is just as effective as the Pill, and so on. On this blog, I’ve been examining the fact that NFP is licit only for “serious reasons”, and questioning the wisdom of promoting NFP without fully investigating how we should define those “serious reasons”.

Now, the same study that was used to promote the notion that 98% of Catholic women have used contraception also notes that only 2% use NFP (see an article about this here). No one has contradicted that figure, and I have not been able to find any other study of the frequency of use of NFP in the US, whether for Catholics, non-Catholics, or the general population. I’m inclined to believe the 2-3% figure is reality.

This has made me realize that the problem isn't really NFP, per se.

That is, the 2% of Catholic couples using NFP – many of whom seem to have at least “medium-sized” families – are not the cause of the decline in the size of Catholic families over the last half-century or so. There aren’t enough of them to have that kind of effect.

But...why not?

Oh, I still believe there are problems with the over-use and justification of NFP, as well as problems with the way NFP is presented and promoted; I intend to delve into those problems further in subsequent posts. But those problems are reflective of an underlying philosophy that is having a sad effect on our Church: the contraceptive mentality of society today. It’s that contraceptive mentality that leads many Catholics to use artificial contraception.

Let’s face it: even if NFP can be as effect as the Pill, the fact is, it's not...due to God's design and human concupiscence, which combine to make NFP "difficult" to practice. And you have to admit that most people are not into "difficult" these days, which will probably prevent NFP from ever spreading like wildfire.

(Oh yeah…and there’s the fact that NFP is only supposed to be used for “serious reasons” – it’s a pesky little detail that cannot be relegated to the realm of the couple’s “discernment”.)

There is a contraceptive mentality behind NFP, and that is a problem. That contraceptive mentality is there despite all the protestations to the contrary.

The secular world seems to
get the connection...

I'm quite aware that throwing the words “contraceptive” and NFP into the same sentence is like throwing gasoline on a fire; but let’s face it: promoting NFP without the proper emphasis on “serious reasons” simply helps people to soothe their consciences when they think about purposefully limiting the number of offspring they produce. It allows good Catholics – who, thank God, do not want to use artificial contraception – to find a way to prevent the conception of “too many” children.

(Of course, the funny thing about children is that once you have them, it’s hard to imagine life without them. A friend of mine was trying to keep tabs on her five children after Mass one Sunday, and someone snidely suggested that maybe she shouldn’t have had so many. The harried mother’s response was, “And which one do you think I shouldn’t have had?”)

I am not arguing that NFP is equivalent to artificial contraception such as the Pill or IUDs; I don’t think that’s the case. I am saying that the motivation for the use of either is the same: the desire for personal control over the number of children and the timing of their appearance (I'm not addressing here the use of NFP to achieve pregnancy). I don’t deny that NFP couples are more open to life than those who have opted for artificial contraception, but I’ve been surprised by the extreme defensiveness I’ve seen on recent blog posts, especially in the accompanying comments. You’d think that the mere suggestion that couples should trust God’s timing was a sin!

I think H. Crocker III had a near-perfect grasp of the issues when he wrote an irreverent, flippant, and very humorous article about NFP a few years ago. He was reminding his readers that the primary end of marriage is procreation; among the more serious comments he included are these (emphases mine):

The case for NFP should, by rights, be the case for more babies. To have them is good. Not to have them is to be deprived…

…another reason for NFP's allegedly high success rate is that couples who use it are prepared to welcome children and so don't blame NFP for unexpected pregnancies. Four of my own five children came the NFP way – that is, totally unexpectedly – and that's a good thing, because without them bouncing in as surprises, excuses to delay (the sort of excuses one might hear from a recruit in parachute training) might have gone on for a very long time…

Rather than bite one's nails to the quick at the prospect of baby number ten – which, if one marries in one's early 20s and practices NFP, is a definite possibility – we should encourage the attitude of the more the merrier, which is a far more attractive case to make than all the goo-goo language about how NFP helps couples "communicate" and about the joy of charting temperatures and discharges and plotting one's conjugal acts as a captain might chart a course for his ship.

Yep. We need more babies. If you’re hung up on the myth of overpopulation, go to this website and watch their short, informative videos on the subject. And consider the lesson of the Japanese, who seem to be on the road to extinction.

Among Crocker's more humorous comments was this solution to the problem of priestly vocations:

So rather than focusing on NFP, premarital preparation should go like this:

Father O'Counselor: "Now I want you two to understand that the primary and fundamental purpose of marriage is not companionship, not romantic love, not moonlit strolls on the beach, or any other balderdash but the begetting and raising of children – lots of 'em, and starting soon. The optimum number is enough so that you can lose a few at the grocery store and not notice. That's giving without counting the cost, and at that point, you won't care anyway. As a priest, my sacrifice for the good of the Church is celibacy. As a married couple, yours is to propagate children – who will incidentally annually propagate fierce storms of influenza in your house. If you haven't already studied up on communicable diseases and basic first aid for children jumping off sofas, I'd do it now. But you will find children and their challenges to be the great tutor of not only the medical but the moral virtues."

Potential Husband: "You mean, I'm screwed?"

Father O'Counselor: "In a manner of speaking, yes."

Potential Husband: "Is it too late to enroll in the seminary?"

We can thus improve Catholic marriages and alleviate the priest shortage at the same time.

So… go and read H. Crocker III’s whole article here. If it makes you laugh…you’re on solid ground, I think.

If it makes you angry…well…I think that reflects a contraceptive mentality in search of a defense. 

Related:

Why Are We Pushing NFP?

On Clarifying the Licit Use of NFP

What's Wrong with NFP?

Abuses of NFP and the Duty of Motherhood

Marital Chastity, Fruitful Multiplication...and NFP?

And see this wonderful post by Cam at A Woman's Place...

Our Journey Through NFP

Recovering from NFP

I received this email from a woman named Amy Merhaut just the other day, and she has kindly agreed that I might post it here. Please read it all the way through – whether you are single, married and young, married and old, or…anything else. There is a lesson and a truth here that goes beyond the rhetoric of the NFP debate.  (I’ve added a few emphases.)

** ** ** ** ** ** ** **

My husband and I had practiced and promoted NFP for 14 years and aggressively promoted it to engaged couples in our Vicariate Marriage Preparation program. We were obnoxious about trying to persuade engaged and married couples to discontinue using artificial contraception and try NFP. 

About two years ago, we began experiencing what I can best describe as a "nudge." Suddenly we had feelings of doubt regarding NFP. We noticed that we were lacking in humility because, let's face it, abstaining during the fertile time in your cycle is really, really difficult and takes great restraint. We mistook our restraint as power, and spent many years believing we were very important people, with a message from God, that artificial contraception users desperately needed to hear – or else they were on the fast track to Hell. We also realized that we, as well as other NFP Promoters in our Marriage Preparation program, were constantly trying to come up with new ways to "get the NFP message out there." Several times a year, we would brainstorm ways to repackage the NFP message to make it more appealing to engaged and married couples. We always felt an urgent need to persuade people to use NFP instead of artificial contraception.

And then, it finally sank in. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH DOES NOT REQUIRE ITS MEMBERS TO USE NFP. All (as if this ALL is small beans!) the Church asks is that Catholics couples not use artificial contraception and that they remain open to new life in their marriages.

But allow me to digress...

Four years ago I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. The very first thought that went through my head was, "Oh no! No more babies!" I was devastated, as our 8th child was almost 2 and my husband and I were hoping for more children. We decided to use NFP to prevent pregnancy and considered my MS a serious reason to do so. I became pregnant soon after, and I remember thinking and saying, "What did I do wrong that I became pregnant?" Sadly, my pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Two more times I became pregnant, and two more times I wondered what I was doing wrong that I kept ending up pregnant. Again, those pregnancies ended in miscarriage as well.  

The third miscarriage was something from a nightmare. Unlike the previous two pregnancies, I actually felt pregnant. I had morning sickness, I was tired, I felt new life growing inside me. Then the spotting began again. I went in for an ultrasound at 12 weeks and saw a beautiful, perfectly formed baby – with no heartbeat. I was truly blindsided. The "demise", as they called it, occurred at 10 weeks. I chose to miscarry at home rather than endure a gruesome DNC that would tear apart our beautiful child. It took three weeks for the miscarriage, and then I almost died on our bathroom floor from blood loss. It was recommended to us that we not conceive again because another miscarriage could end my life. With heavy hearts, we agreed.

We had to figure out what we had been doing "wrong" with our NFP use so I would not become pregnant again, which meant MORE abstinence. On top of that, we were deeply grieving our lost children and the realization that our childbearing years were over. I was barely surviving. Slowly, as the days passed, my husband and I settled into a new normal. Our youngest child was now over 3, and we could leave our children for a few hours at a time. You could say my husband and I started dating again with the time we made for each other.

The more time alone my husband and I spent together, the more difficult abstinence became. We started cheating on the NFP rules, knowing full well pregnancy was possible, but just kind of winging it and trusting in God's plan for us.

After 3 months of blatant NFP rule breaking, I was pregnant again…and terrified. But this time I did not feel like we had done anything "wrong". We knew in our hearts that we had left the option of pregnancy up to God, not prayerful discernment or physicians. Still, I prayed for an early miscarriage all day every day, as images of our lifeless baby haunted my every waking moment. I went to Reconciliation, explained our story to the priest, and confessed what I had been doing. I received loving words from the priest that encouraged me to change my prayers and continue to trust in God. My husband and I set small goals for our pregnancy, and each time we reached one, we rejoiced. Then our midwives ordered an ultrasound to check for fetal viability. I lay on the table waiting, waiting, and I saw our baby. There was a heartbeat! Praise God! As I write this, I am nursing our sleeping 9-month-old baby boy, born on my husband's birthday.

During my pregnancy, I admitted to my husband that I never wanted to use NFP again. Thankfully, he agreed. Despite my MS, and despite my age (43!), I had never felt better. I truly believe it is because I was with child – exactly how God wanted me to be. We were given the gift of our son because we trusted God to plan our life, not doctors, not ourselves.

So back to the nudge... In retrospect, my husband and I were guilty of the "theological narcissism" that Pope Francis has been speaking of. We felt empowered by our NFP knowledge, quoting Theology of the Body and Humanae Vitae ad nauseum. We lived life looking for moments to insert NFP into a conversation, all the while using phrases and words like: God's Plan for your life, effective, in harmony with Catholic teaching, safe, natural, affordable, green, enhances communication, open to life etc., etc., etc. But is NFP open to life if you are preventing pregnancy? NO. Is using NFP truly God's plan for your family if you are preventing pregnancy? NO.

We believe our initial nudge turned into God shoving us off our high horse so we could land in the dirt and have nowhere to look but up…at Him. John 3:30 says, "He must increase, I must decrease." We resigned from teaching our Marriage Preparation program because it has an NFP agenda we cannot support. We no longer feel the desperate need to promote NFP, all day, every day. Our NFP friends keep their distance from us now. And we feel an extraordinary peace, knowing that at least in this aspect of our life, we are truly trusting God to mold and shape our marriage and our family.

My husband and I believe the main reason couples aren't interested in learning NFP is because we promoters are hypocrites. Whether you are using artificial contraception or NFP, the end result is the same – no babies. All the lingo that I listed earlier, which NFP promoters use to inspire couples to learn NFP, is simply church-speak for Catholic birth control. We started using NFP after we delivered our 4th child in 6 years. I had previously taken the Pill, but had too many side effects so I stopped using it. My husband and I were expanding our family quickly, and we wanted a natural way to space the babies. We learned about NFP in a Diocesan Marriage Preparation teacher-training program. We embraced learning about and using NFP so we could begin spacing our children. So there you have it – despite being a devoutly Catholic couple, we were contraception-minded, and NFP is contraception. Thankfully, we have used NFP to prevent pregnancy maybe 12-15 months in 14 years of knowing NFP. But how many souls did we purposefully prevent from being in our family? I grieve just thinking about it. Even worse, how many souls have we prevented blessing this earth by encouraging other couples to use NFP? May God forgive us. 

There really is no way to promote being open to life other than to genuinely and faithfully live what the Catholic Church teaches. Hopefully, when people see our large family, they will notice our happiness and our peace, and they will want what we have. We certainly don't have the most money, or the most fashionable clothes, or the most up-to-date electronics, or the most well-furnished home, or the coolest vehicles (although our 12-passenger van is legendary for the fun you may have as a guest passenger!). We struggle and we sacrifice, sometimes A LOT of both at the same time. But we have a wealth and abundance of love, playmates, helpers and friends. There is no hypocrisy in that.

What Do Children Learn When Their Parents Use NFP?

Some interesting comments have appeared on one of my NFP posts. They all address the effect on children of their parents using NFP – not necessarily the effect when the children are still children, but how the effect manifests itself when the children become adults themselves. [And if you have experiences to share along these lines, I’d love to hear from you. Comments are great, but emails are better, as I would appreciate having contact information for those willing to answer further questions. Contact me at drjayboyd@msn.com]

A few months ago, a guest post on this blog by Fr. William Gardner addressed the topic of talking to children about NFP. I introduced his contribution with this comment  on a previous post (all emphases in this post are mine):

 I was enjoying the talk, until the point where she shared her new insights with her husband and they discussed what to do. At that point, I expected her to say, "It was so wonderful; God opened his heart, and he agreed we should not contracept”. Instead, she said (paraphrasing), "It was so wonderful; God opened his heart, and we agreed to learn how to practice NFP!" They had 3 children at that point (and still do), and appeared to be a financially stable, healthy middle class family. She kept going on about how horrible it would be if she got pregnant and how upset she would be, but how they were just going to "trust God" and abstain every month and live "according to God's plan" (!!)

… I hope none of their 3 children ever hears that CD…

In his essay, Fr. Gardner wrote:

…[T]he more that conception is controlled, the greater danger of misunderstanding the giftedness of human life.  But periodic continence is employed precisely because of its aspect of control over conception, or the avoidance thereof.

Bearing in mind these considerations, an indelicate parent might say to a daughter or son:  "Things were really rough, and then when we decided it was O.K. to have a baby, you came along!"  A more thoughtful approach might be the following:  "Things were really rough, and then you came along!"  The latter statement, although not revealing all the details of the situation, tends to emphasize more clearly the giftedness of human life.

…

The widespread, indiscriminate promotion of natural birth regulation will unavoidably contribute to the contraceptive mentality, precisely because of its emphasis on human control over conception.  On the contrary, the firm and forthright condemnation of artificial contraception, sterilization, abortion, and the homosexual lifestyle, without explicit reference to NFP will send a clear message that God's life-giving love is not to be opposed.

Think about it: the NFP sites never show bright, smiling children’s faces – just beaming couples who have eyes for no one else but themselves. What message does such a relationship impart to the children, as they mature and form their own ideas about marriage?

By way of an anecdotal answer to that question, here are excerpts from comments left at my post "Forward Boldly" Radio Show: Discussion of NFP. First, consider this one:

…What still needs to be investigated is the effect of NFP marriages on the children themselves. The speakers [on the show] pointed to an insidious inversion of the ends of marriage by the NFP cultists.  What does it do to a child to be secondary to the unitive dimension of their parents' marriage?

That is a very good question! And I think it puts the debate over the “equality” of the procreative and “unitive” dimensions of marriage into a different perspective.

Here’s another comment regarding the influence on the children’s perception of marriage and family size:

I think the consequences of the NFP lifestyle are broader than most modern Catholics are willing to admit. …My parents were very keen on NFP and I attribute that fact to the fact that neither me nor my sister has ever seriously considered family life…. [W]hen you grow up in a family of 4 surrounded by similar-sized families (probably contracepting) it has a long term effect on you. We both suffer from materialism more than our parents.

This certainly rings true. Our perceptions of an ideal family size are shaped by our experiences; though of course, another mitigating factor would probably be one’s perception of the effect of siblings on one’s own well-being.

Here’s one more comment along the same lines:

I was a well-loved, spoiled at times, only child who never thought her parents' NFP marriage was such a hot role model. Please God, I don't blame them for my certain spinsterhood but I've shown less interest in marriage than my peers who grew up in contracepting households that knew infidelity and divorce, and then repeated it in their own marriages. Talk about not learning from someone else's mistakes. We need a serious reassessment here.

Finally, here’s one from the post written by Fr. Gardner:

I don't know how old I was at the time, but I no longer believed in Santa Claus and I doubt I was in high school yet. It was the middle of December and I went snooping through my parents room looking for presents. Without my sister seeing (I never told her) I found the NFP books. I cried for days. The sudden realization about why we were the only children hit hard.

Again, this is only anecdotal evidence; I know there are NFP-using couples whose adult children have married and who hope to have large families. Interestingly, though, the examples I can think of, based on my own knowledge, are NFP couples who have 8 or 9 children.

Another aspect of the “side-effects” of NFP use (or perhaps it would be better to say “over-use”) is brought out in several comments that related NFP use to the “feminization” of the Church and the family. For instance:

I think both sides will agree that contraceptives objectify women for the benefit of misogynists who wish to use them as toys but has anyone ever considered that the NFP movement may be part of the feminization of the Church? We always hear that it is about her body, her cycles, and the perfection of her design. The implication is that men, who are ready to go at any time, are by nature flawed. And just try to ask if the phrase "marriage debt" is relevant today. Ask it on an NFP blog and you'll be called a Neanderthal before the end of the day.

An NFP marriage necessarily puts the woman in charge, and children, particularly boys, who grow up in homes where mother wore the pants are often candidates for homosexuality. I've seen it in the NFP homes of my parish but more often than that I find young adults who show absolutely no interest in marriage. One I knew expressed himself so well: "I'd rather have the marriage of my grandparents than my parents." It's hard to make the case that the Church's view of marriage is different from what they see on TV. None of them know anyone who was ever turned down for an annulment, and NFP is constantly touted for its effectiveness…

Following the same line of thought, another commenter added:

We had to go through mandatory NFP training prior to marriage run by a husband and wife. I got to know them a little better when we were in their parish for two years.

The poor man, he never got to say anything and his wife never passed up an opportunity to talk about how NFP enriched their lives. He just stood there and nodded. I think he really enjoyed his time away from his wife and going to games with my husband. Neither their son nor their daughter ever expressed any interest in marriage.

I think that quite likely children perceive the double-speak that is involved with NFP use; kids are better at that than adults, and that’s why it was a child who insisted that “the emperor has no clothes”. Some of the commenters on my posts pointed out the fact that NFP is actually quite difficult to justify in terms of being different from contraception in the long run. For instance:

When I took my first NFP course, it wasn't by choice and I was a recent convert… I knew very little about moral philosophy and theology at the time… I was open to fuzzy-touchy-feely-thinking and reasoning from non sequiturs. It wouldn't be until I started reading good material, that my thoughts began to change…  I came to see that Catholic theology was a very precise Science…I struggled to square NFP arguments into the pattern of thinking I was acquiring and couldn't. Sure, I could see how contraception was intrinsically evil and NFP was neutral, but the arguments in favor of using it seemed like they were designed to appeal more toward hippies than theologians, Catholic theologians.

No one could tell me why this kind of marriage was better. No one could explain how it improved communications. What did couples talk about 100yrs ago and why did they stay together? 

Another commenter added some thought about Theology of the Body:

Christopher West has suggested we could never understand human sexuality until JP2's Theology of the Body because Scholasticism is inadequate. Piffle! TOB is little more than an excuse to use the Faith to talk about sex. It has even been used to justify sodomy.

In addition to having fewer kids, I have found the NFP parents are always trying to get away from them by taking vacations alone. By contrast, the so-called "providentialists" can't seem to get enough of them.

And finally, there was this wry observation:

I listened to this podcast well before the controversy got going over the article in Christian Order. It was a debate between an NFP advocate and a traditionalist. Both had six kids and at the end of the debate, the NFP-er said: "No, we don't use it. We can't even plan our lunches."

That would be an amusing note on which to conclude this post, sort of along the lines of Harry Crocker’s line: “Use NFP; it doesn’t work!”  But the bottom line is this: NFP was born of the concept of “responsible parenthood”; “responsible parenthood” seems to have been born of the fear of overpopulation, and it’s a phrase that, for all practical purposes, is used to mean “limit the number of children you have”. And that basic concept is at the heart and history of Planned Parenthood.  The last commenter I mentioned had also added this note:

Renew America author Randy Engel has also exposed the link between Planned Parenthood and the early promotion of NFP by Church leaders in the early sixties. I highly recommend it for getting your head around the motives.

You can read more about that in Randy Engel’s book The McHugh Chronicles. The first chapter is available on-line here.

If you have experiences and thoughts to share about how parents’ NFP use (or over-use) can affect their children’s perceptions of marriage and family, please comment, or email me. I would like to have contact information if possible, so I can follow up with questions. Contact me at drjayboyd@msn.com

Another Voice on "Heroic Parenthood"

A reader sent me a link to an article in Christian Order magazine, and I’ve seen it in various places since then – it was featured on Tantamergo’s blog, and also on Rorate Caeli blog.

The article, “Heroic Parenthood”, by Christopher Gawley, is an excellent summary of the issues surrounding NFP. The amazing thing, to me, is that Mr. Gawley’s article is essentially a concise and eloquent summary of my book, Natural Family Planning: Trojan Horse in the Catholic Bedroom?  - but he wrote the article without any awareness of what I have said on the topic (which I maintain is what the Church has said). I think the Holy Spirit enlightened each of us independently, along with others like John Galvin, Fr. William Gardner, Carey Winters, Randy Engel, and Michael Malone, who have also written on the topic, and who helped me to think about it.

 Mr. Gawley has stated the concepts in a way that is fresh and inspirational to me, so I am going to present some excerpts from the article here, with a few comments interspersed. It was difficult not to just copy-and-paste the entire article – it’s that good! - but you can read it for yourself in its entirety here. For the moment, I want to give you a taste to whet your appetite, and also highlight some of the outstanding points Mr. Gawley makes.

The article is divided into four major sections, and I will arrange the excerpts and my comments accordingly.

The Problem Stated: An Ever-growing Contraceptive Anti-Culture

Mr. Gawley makes clear from the beginning what he sees as the source of the problems in the Church today. “Of all of the symptoms that demonstrate the disease in the Church, none does so more meaningfully than the decline of the Catholic family (and all families by extension)…” He notes that

The reduction in the Catholic family — indeed, all families — is undoubtedly due to rapid advance of artificial contraception. Taken together, "legalized" abortion and artificial contraception have formed a one-two punch to drive down family sizes much to the joy of modern-day Malthusians.

The Proposed Solution: Responsible Parenthood and Natural Family Planning

The NFP community – and now the US bishops – have promoted NFP as the solution to the unfortunate Catholic propensity to run counter to Church teaching by using artificial contraception.  Gawley asserts that

The history of NFP cannot be divorced from artificial contraception. In the context of condemning birth control, Holy  Mother Church has taught that NFP, as a dispensation from the normal relations between husband and wife, can be morally acceptable…

He quotes from Pope Pius XII’s Allocution to Midwives regarding the need for serious motives to avoid pregnancy while still engaging in the marital embrace. He also notes that, regarding Humanae Vitae,

… what essentially began as qualified dispensation from normal marital relations and obligations has morphed in recent years into something very different in the minds of the Church leaders.  A negative – that is, a permission to deviate from the norm for grave reasons, has been transformed into a positive.

Mr. Gawley goes on to examine the stance of the US bishops, who seem to have made NFP “a de facto teaching as the way in which married couples ought to relate to one another — a holy good in and of itself… “.  

There can be no question that NFP has eclipsed — at least from official diocesan sources — any other way that marriage and fecundity should be understood. …NFP is styled in almost mystic terms as one of the greatest revelations regarding married life in the history of the Church. What you are more likely to hear at a real-world Catholic marriage preparation class is the following on the question of children – usually by a mature Catholic co-teaching married couple with a few children:

Catholicism does not require that you become parents of a large family – rather it wants you to be responsible parents. NFP offers you a reasonable alternative to artificial contraception: a way for you young couples to be responsible while not availing yourselves to drugs or devices that degrade your humanity. You should use these NFP techniques to grow closer, to communicate better, and prayerfully consider whether and when you should bring children into the world in a responsible manner. If that

means that you need to delay — even permanently — having children, that is acceptable today with the use of NFP. And what's more, NFP is proven to be 99% effective for avoiding pregnancy — just as effective as the pill.

Yes, always we are reminded that NFP is as effective as the Pill…not that anyone has a “contraceptive mentality” where NFP is concerned...

Why Natural Family Planning Has Failed

And regarding the argument that NFP cannot possibly be used with a “contraceptive mentality”, Mr. Gawley says:

I thought hard about it but realized at the end that this argument was sophistry. What critics of NFP zealotry mean by "contraceptive mentality" is that people – many people – use NFP as the practical substitute for contraception to avoid children altogether while still enjoying the sensual pleasures of marital relations. Truly it is a form of conjugal bulimia. While NFP brings you to a place without children in a markedly different manner, it nonetheless still brings you there.

Mr. Gawly talks also about the failure to consider the necessary moral grounds for using NFP – i.e, “serious” or “grave” reasons. He follows it up with this important consequence:

A corollary principle that follows from ignoring the moral requirements of availing oneself to NFP is that our rightly ordered disposition towards it – and childbearing – has been inverted. Because NFP advocates treat NFP as a good without qualification, couples are encouraged to view using NFP as a positive part of their conjugal lives. But Catholic couples ought to feel a sorrow by having the necessity to resort to NFP. By analogy, NFP is a type of bankruptcy in a technical sense. Bankruptcy is also a legal dispensation – from our lawful debts. Bankruptcy also should be used for serious and grave reasons. While we should not judge the bankrupt or cloak him in shame, we should not celebrate him or the dispensation either. NFP is similar: for grave and serious reasons, we cannot fulfill our obligations to be totally open to children (for a time or permanently) – we should not celebrate this as a good thing but rather endure it.

I particularly like his argument about bankruptcy and “dispensation from our lawful debts”; it meshes nicely with the comments in the sermon I transcribed here, which also mentioned the “marriage debt”.

And then there’s the modesty issue:

Another problem with NFP in practice is its vulgarity: its pedestrian treatment of something intimate, something exalted, something requiring modesty tends to desacralize marital relations. Must engaged Catholic couples be subjected – in a room full of others – to the science of charting the appearance of cervical mucus and vaginal discharge? Must they discuss what one hopes is their future sexual life in the midst of strangers? … Count me as one of the few, I suppose, who does not believe that the assiduous monitoring of my wife's menstrual cycle – and discussing it in mixed company – will make me a better communicator or husband… If I sound prudish, perhaps I am, but others have seen in this type of forced public discussion of sex and the science behind it as the risk of vulgarizing the holy.

The Solution Stated: Heroic Parenthood and the Cult of Embracing Large Families

I’ll let Mr. Gawley take it from here:

Simply stated, the idea of "responsible parenthood" sells the faith short and is pregnant (pardon the pun) with concepts that are inconsistent with Catholic heroism. We should not settle for "responsible parenthood" but aspire for "heroic parenthood." Our Lord did not come so that we may have a dispensation or a life centered around infertility; he came for us to have an abundant life

.

…More than any other visible social institution, large Catholic families contradict all of the ill-conceived assumptions of modernity. They are, as it were, a collective middle finger to an anti-culture that would tell us that God is dead, that man and life are worthless, and that it would be better if we were never born. The shining radiance and exuberance of large families is a living, breathing rejoinder to the dour and childless chorus. But large families are more than a counter-cultural expression, they epitomize Catholicism in practice because the parents are blessed by living out their married vocation in the fullest sense. God's blessing of children and fecundity itself seems to be a forgotten part of this debate

…. We have an answer to those who would maintain that life should be little more than a titillated distraction before rotting into nothingness: they are a death people that want to organize society around preventing babies, killing babies, killing disabled people, and killing old people. Their world is a more than a social malaise: it is gripped by despair and thirsting for living waters. We have to offer the living waters of the Gospel; we are a life people and nothing communicates our trust in God, our love of life, our belief in each other than our unconditional embrace of children. The world will be re-converted by such families.

Mr. Gawley ends with this Postscript:

While it would be virtually unthinkable that a diocesan marriage preparation program might say something as follows, we can still dream:

For you young Catholic people who are marrying in your twenties, you can expect, God willing and absent a physical impairment or grave reason, to have a home filled with many children. You should mentally, physically and spiritually prepare for seven, eight, nine or more children given your ages. You should be prepared to accept the hardships that come with having a large family for two important reasons; children please our Lord and your cooperation with the Lord in bringing forth new souls will in turn please our God, which will bring you many graces. Second, having a large family will help you be saved, it will re-focus your attention from the material attachments that are both rampant today and hazardous to your eternal destination. Your many children will help you to become better and holier people and will stand as a contradiction to a world that has forgot how to live the abundant life. You, and your large faithful families, will turn the tide against the scoffers and misanthropes who would revile God's creation and man's place in it. We cannot promise you it will be easy because it won't, but if you persevere in prayer and virtue, you will overcome with God's grace. And should you live to see your children's children, you will praise God all the more that he saw fit to give you the gift of faith.

Have life and have it abundantly — have children.