July 27, 2011
By Gerri Laird
“My children are going to pay for your Social Security!” That was my response to one of my husband’s co-workers when he approached me at a company picnic and loudly criticized my pregnancy with child #5. My husband and I were pregnant by choice. He didn’t have a response – he and his wife were childless by choice.
But, child #5 must have heard this conversation while in utero. When he was old enough to talk, he came running down the stairs one day and asked if we loved him and his brothers and sisters. Our “Of course,” was met with, “Then, why aren’t there more babies around here? You love each other, right? Well, when mommies and daddies love each other, babies come…so why aren’t there more babies around here?” From the mouths of babes, we learn Natural Family Planning (NFP) and responsible parenthood 101! And as this has been designated “Natural Family Planning Awareness Week” by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, it may be time to reflect on how our innate love of siblings and children can be better understood by embracing Church teaching on fertility and sexuality.
Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) on July 25, 1968. In this encyclical, the Holy Father challenged husbands and wives to gain knowledge of their biological functions related to fertility (NFP), while teaching us that “The responsible exercise of parenthood implies…that husband and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values…not every conjugal act is followed by a new life…Nonetheless the Church…teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.”[1] Blessed John Paul II went a step further and “…elevated natural family planning to an apostolate, a tool for all to use on the path to holiness.”[2]
God in His wisdom linked love, sexual intimacy, and procreation. In the midst of a culture that is on the verge of legally enforcing the error that a woman’s healthy reproductive system be treated as a disease by health insurance providers, we would do well to share the benefits of NFP not only with our families and neighbors, but also with medical professionals and members of our church community. Why? To correct the false assumptions of radical feminism and the current sexual liberationist ideology by revealing the truth about the human person – that we are to be loved and not used.
Natural Family Planning involves knowledge about a couple’s fertility. It reveals essential aspects of the profound mystery of the human person, and it enables a married couple to “read” the language of their sexual powers and determine the status of their fertility on any given day. Of course, NFP is more than just the study of human physiology: It is a way to teach the world the incomparable dignity of the human person, who, by nature, expresses love through the body. NFP helps us do this by revealing that we are more than the sum of our biological parts because we are made in the image and likeness of God. As such, we are called to do what God does, that is, to love. ”God created man…calling him to existence through love. He called him at the same time for love…Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.”[3]
Many Americans, on the other hand, hold the view that persons can use their own bodies and those of others as if they were mere things. We already see where this line of thinking takes us. If the body is a thing, a mere machine that each of us owns and operates, we can do anything we want with it. With this impoverished understanding, contraception, sterilization, fornication, adultery, homosexual acts, and embryonic stem cell research naturally follow and seem perfectly acceptable. Surrogate motherhood and abortion are considered acceptable as well – the parents claim ownership of the baby they “produced.” With in vitro fertilization, mother, father, and baby are treated like biological material from vending machines.
This mechanistic view of the human person is clearly an offense to human dignity. If we are not made in the image of God, then what limits are there to how we use our bodies – ourselves – or others?
Under the guise of “choice,” and “women’s health” (what happened to men’s health?), we have lost sight of what it means to be human. Every choice is considered legitimate, and “health” is no longer about caring for our bodies as we should, but making our bodies do what we want them to do.
We are already far down the slippery slope which the Holy Father warned us about in Humanae Vitae. But we have choices – real choices – about how we respond going forward. The truth about the human person as revealed through NFP can lead us to act responsibly and to experience true freedom – the ability to do what we ought. However, it is impossible to act responsibly if we are unaware of the truth.
If it hadn’t been for the generosity of one woman who challenged me to investigate NFP over 35 years ago, there would be no child #5…or #4…or #3. We would be minus a police officer, a professional organist/pianist, a religious sister, and at least one grandchild. NFP taught us what it means to be true lovers, and not users, of one another; often with a profound appreciation of each other as a unique and unrepeatable gift. Do we need NFP awareness? I’m sure my children would respond with an emphatic “Yes!”
[1] Pope Paul VI, On Human Life (Humanae Vitae) (Boston: Pauline books & Media), 1968, No. 10.
[2] Revs. Richard M. Hogan and John M. LeVoir, Covenant of Love, 1985, p.260.
[3] Blessed John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (The Apostolic Exhortation on the Family in the Modern World), Article 11, 1981.
Geri Laird is a Contributing Writer of HLI America. She writes for the Truth and Charity Forum.
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This article discusses natural family planning with the usual focus…assuming that births are to be regulated. There is no mention of the caveat that there is to be a “just reason” (2368 in Catechism of Catholic Church).
My husband and I married in 1970 and part of our marriage prep course was training in the Billings method of spacing children. I was highly excited about the witness I would provide in my married life, to “space” children using natural means. Others would be amazed at my ability to produce children every 3 years (my own version of “Planned Parenthood”) and I would tell them how!
But once I became pregnant with the fourth child in four years, my husband and I got down on our knees in frustration. There was no Catholic Catechism at that time, but there was Humanae Vitae. In there we found the best kept secret of the modern church. We read it together and found out we needed a “serious reason” to limit births, since God had a plan for each family, and openness to life was essential to that plan. Ten children later, each one created from a unique “palette” provided every month by the genes of my husband and myself, we have three children in the religious life, and the others deeply committed to the spiritual life. I think that the family character of “openness to life” and to God’s plan, which we basically stumbled on ourselves and have NEVER heard in an article or sermon, has helped our children reflect the same in their vocations, whether religious or secular.
I am assuming the writers of the many articles I have read about natural family planning have a “just reason” (the new term found in the catechism) for spacing births. And that the couples are practicing NFP only for a time, with great “sorrow” (Humanae Vitae). But since this is never mentioned in the articles I have read, I am afraid the opposite message is being sent to the readers. This is the same message my husband and I picked up in our marriage prep: “USE NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING INSTEAD OF CONTRACEPTION TO SPACE YOUR CHILDREN. YOU ARE STILL IN CHARGE!”
We fortunately are in charge of very little in this life, but to be in charge in such a critical area is disastrous! If the transmission of human life is the “proper mission” (2367 Catechism) of marriage then we all should be open to life at all times, unless, temporarily, with “just cause” we must limit the marriage act at certain times.
There is no reason why NFP couldn’t fit under the general heading of “openness to life”. It is just that not only must each marriage ACT be open to life, but each marriage ITSELF. That needs to clarified more if marriages can become free enough to trust God to space the children and to create freely using the husband and wife as His unique palatte each month.
If St. Paul were created a month later, there’s a chance he might have been a stay-at-home kinda guy, content to visit the temple regularly, and study his scriptures, but lacking that fire in his heart, the fire that he spread over vast distances in space and time. Created by God, from one act of mother and father, open to life. St Paul. St John. Blessed Mother Teresa. God grant us many marriages with that same potential!!!
I want to comment on the previous comment: I am not alarmed that people use NFP with a contraceptive mentality, and therefore forfeit the beauty and purpose by which it enriches a marriage, indeed it truly can be abused. But I was surprised and am always saddened when persons suggest that using NFP (and I stipulate for those just reasons each couple has to discern with prayerful consideration ) as dangerously paving the way to a hardening of the heart that is not open to life. One can always be open to every gift and blessing and the will of God without specifically wishing for it at that very moment. And when one uses NFP with that openness, they indeed are opening the marriage to children.
I also take issue with “couples only practicing NFP for a time, and with great sorrow” and then suggesting that comes from Humanae Vitae. I can’t find specifically the words sorrow in reference to periodic abstinence. I looked in the most relevant section #16 “The Morality of Recourse to the Infertile Period.” Did I overlook it? Instead I would like to point out how NFP lived out in accordance to the dignity of the spouses and the human person fosters the values promoted in section #21 of Humanae Vitae titled “Self-Mastery.”
And let me point out that perhaps my sensitivity comes from a certain attitude, very much perhaps unknowingly relayed by those who are suspicious that NFP is even moral, that pricks and condemns those of us who are infertile with the sort of air that holiness (at least in regards to motherhood) is proportional to the fruitfulness of the womb. I very much appreciate the generosity and heroic faith, and of course the vocations, a large family can witness to. And I hope this is very much the case in most large Catholic families, but sadly it is not always the case, i.e. in the cases where it is more an issue of “self-mastery.” (And I want to point that is not what I am suggesting this at all with the above commenter.)
I have to agree with the first comment. Where do we get the idea that births are to be regulated. It is truly a modern notion. The Church has granted recourse to this as an exception not the rule. Pius XII said “grave reason”, Paul VI said “serious reason”, and the Catechism says “just cause”. And of course most modern day NFP apostles give no cause or reason at all other than perhaps “prayerful consideration” which is far removed from the Pius’s original “grave reason”. If “prayerful consideration” was all that was required my wife and I would have stopped at one as we could hardly afford him. We had 10 more “mistakes”, 11 children (so far). And God has provided amazingly for each one of them. It’s having children that creates the conjugal bond not skipping them. NFP apostles assume that the natural inclination for a woman to engage in the conjugal act during ovulation is something to be skipped. God put that inclination there for a reason. In the marriage ceremony we vow to accept children willingly and lovingly from God. It truly is amazing to see how we have taken God’s plan for children and made it something to scientifically be controlled. The bottom line for Church teaching is GRAVE reason. And Pius actually spells that out. Too bad it is given such sort thrift in NFP teaching. For it is the only thing that makes the method moral.