NFP and Truth (and Suffering)

This is the second in a series of posts dealing with NFP and some recent controversies surrounding it. The first post dealt with how accusation that Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae because if he did otherwise the Church "should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 [when Casti Connubii was promulgated] and in 1951" is fundamentally a concern about the nature of the Church and the authority of the Church's teaching power, not an accusation about clerical misogyny or failing to listen to the experiences of married couples. In this second post, we're going to talk about NFP itself, some of the problems with it, and some of the problems with how people talk about it.

Back in July, Melinda Selmys (whose post series inspired this one) had post on NFP (Natural Family Planning, lest the insider acronym be unfamiliar to anyone) which was somewhat inspired by the "NFP awareness week" which many in the Catholic online world were conducting.

So it’s NFP awareness week, and nothing will do a woman more good in the midst of a faith-crisis than blogging about NFP…right?

Anyway, I did end up reading one of the many NFP articles that are circulating this week. The upshot of this one is that the woman who is writing it hates NFP. It doesn’t improve her marriage, or increase intimacy in her relationship, and it’s not really preventing her from getting pregnant. Her body doesn’t have time to recover between pregnancies, and she’s experiencing pregnancy loss – possibly as a result. So far, so familiar. However, she is continuing with it because she believes in the unchanging teaching of the Catholic Church and so she is being obedient even though it is causing her suffering and she doesn’t understand why it’s a good thing.

Also, painfully familiar.

I remember when the awareness week was going around, and I recall studiously not taking part in it, despite the fact that NFP has been fairly intimately connected with our lives for the last sixteen years. There is too often, I fear, a boom and bust cycle to NFP boosterism. The bust is not always the kind of complete questioning of Church teaching authority which Selmys's struggle with it seems to have led to (following up on the above linked post in which she questions why the Church teaches someone in her situation must not use contraception, she went on to a four part series on papal infallibility, which she more or less rejects now, demonstrating I think that rejection of the Church's teaching on contraception ends up hinging on questions of doctrinal authority, not sexuality.) But even when the result is simply grim compliance rather than attempted rejection of the Church's teaching about contraception, I think that the tendency of NFP boosters to over-promise results in the ten-to-twelve-years-into-marriage disillusion with those promises which I've often heard from other Catholics.

MrsD: Perhaps it was around NFP Awareness Week when I heard someone who'd been married for a few years and had a few young kids, bemoaning the fact that no one had ever mentioned that NFP was so hard, and why did no one ever talk about this? And I said nothing, because we already wrote that same post back when we'd been married a few years and had a few young kids ourselves. It seemed like we were constantly fighting this monthly battle pitting desire against risk of pregnancy, and dear God, how long would it go on this way? Well, the answer is that nothing in life is static. NFP has been, intermittently, a trial, a slog, a blessing, a lifeline, and just a thing that we do or don't do, depending on necessity.

By now the term "NFP" is almost too fraught, carrying connotations of some big oppressive system. Say it with me, though: all it is is 1) observing the signs of female fertility -- a morally neutral act -- and 2) using those observations as part of a prudential judgment about whether to have sex based on the possibility of pregnancy as a result. That's a bit long to type out, so at least in this series of posts, all "NFP" refers to is this basic idea of observation and decision-making process, not the guidelines and rules of any particular system -- Marquette, Creighton, CCL, whatever. And these rules are not moral imperatives. The Ten Commandments are moral imperatives. The injunction against contraception is a moral imperative backed by the authority of the Catholic church, all dissent to the contrary. Not having sex on day seven when mucus is present is not a moral imperative, and pregnancy is not a punishment for breaking that rule. It's simply a guideline.

There are two different ways that NFP advocates often over promise. One has to do with ease and accuracy of method, an area of technical over-promising if you will. This often seems to have to do with wanting to make NFP seem like an easy and reliable way to space pregnancies, and so choosing (perhaps unconsciously) to make things sound more universal and consistent than the variations of actual women's biology are. The one of these which we ran into as a young married couple was the insistence (at the time at least) in Couple to Couple League materials that you didn't need to worry about fertility coming back quickly while you were breastfeeding, and that you'd probably have a couple infertile cycles coming off of that post-partum infertility in order to let you get used to it. Well, MrsDarwin was the one who gave the OB a double take on the first appointment for our second child by answering the question "when was your last period" with "eighteen months ago."

My impression is that this technical simplification/over-promising has gotten somewhat better over the last sixteen years that NFP has been on our radar (CCL has, for instance, apparently scaled back somewhat it's claims about ecological breastfeeding always resulting in long post-partum infertility) but it's still often the case that when someone talks about the difficulty of knowing when is and is not a fertile time, there are eager people who turn up to explain how the sufferer is doing it all wrong. This defensiveness (it would be easy if you would just do it right!) can be an additional frustration for people already having a hard time with NFP, but it is not the kind of problem that I'd like to talk about in this post. Rather, I'd like to discuss the more relationship-focused aspect of NFP discourse.

If you've moved in these circles, you've probably heard the claims: NFP will divorce proof your marriage! It improves communication between husband and wife! It encourages respect for the whole person! It increases intimacy, and each return to sex after a brief period of abstinence is like another honeymoon!

NFP Is Not Magic
One of the problems with claims such as "NFP improves your communication!" or "NFP will divorce proof your marriage" is that they seem to suggest a rather confused idea of what NFP is and why a couple would practice it. When a couple uses NFP to avoid pregnancy, what are they trying to achieve? Their immediate goal in using NFP is not to reduce their chances of divorce or to achieve better communication (though both of those are good things!) but rather to avoid getting pregnant.

Now, as we think about avoiding pregnancy, there are two obvious ways to succeed. The absolutely sure fire method is not to have sex. Your humble correspondents here spent four years dating and engaged as hotblooded and very fertile young people, and yet by this very simple expedient of not having sex, we never got pregnant through that entire four years. By comparison, after getting married and starting to have sex, we got pregnant within two months.

Yet, though not having sex is an age-old, cheap, and incredibly reliable means of not having children, it's not one that most married couples want to sign up for. Why? Because in addition to making babies (the procreative aspect) sex provides couples with a powerful means of expressing love and unity (the unitary aspect.)

Thus, couples have, throughout history, sometimes wished that they could have sex and enjoy those feelings of unity without risking getting pregnant, and attempted this by means of various barrier or chemical means. (Yes, both barrier and chemical birth control was known in the ancient world -- it was just somewhat less reliable than the modern medical versions of these methods.) And yet the Catholic Church, in keeping with the teaching of Christians dating back to the earliest days of the Church, teaches that rending sex intentionally sterile by using artificial contraception is wrong, because it intentionally removes the procreative aspect from sexual intercourse.

So how does NFP fit into this situation? Natural Family Planning consists of observing the wife's natural cycle of fertility and abstaining from intercourse during the periods when she is fertile. In other words, it's the age-old means of avoiding pregnancy by not having sex, but made somewhat less draconian by allowing couples to target their abstinence just towards the times when they might conceive. During standard cycles, this would mean abstaining for a week or two at a time out of each month, rather than abstaining totally. (Some health issues can, however, make the signs of fertility much harder to read and thus require a couple who very urgently need to avoid pregnancy have to abstain from sex for much longer.)

NFP to avoid pregnancy is nothing more or less than targeted abstinence, allowing the couple to avoid pregnancy by giving up sex some of the time rather than all of the time. This is why claims that NFP itself is "contraceptive" in its mentality so clearly fall flat. Avoiding sex is always a moral means of avoiding pregnancy, and NFP is nothing more than avoiding sex.

Why, then, do we see all these expansive claims about the benefits of NFP which have seemingly little to do with avoiding sex or avoiding pregnancy?

MrsD: At the moment Jesus died on the cross, the veil of the temple sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. Now the presence of God was immediate; his holiness was not hidden, and the veil ceased to provide a lulling sense of being hidden or protected from the gaze of God. 

NFP is not magic. It doesn't divorce-proof your marriage, because married couples who use NFP can still sin in other ways. It only improves communication if a couple chooses to communicate. But it does rend the veil. It strips away the false sense of security and certainty that contraception provides. It shines a sometimes harsh white light on the characters of a husband and wife and how they respond to the necessity for chastity and prudence. Light can help a person see, or it can dazzle and blind. That's not magic. That's exposure to truth. 

Nor is contraception magic. Using the veil of contraception to hide from the demands of chastity might allow you to have sex when otherwise you'd have to abstain, but it doesn't make chastity moot. Hiding behind the veil of contraception may give a false sense of control, but doesn't mean that having sex in a fertile period will actually never result in pregnancy. Why is it that Mary is praised for asking how it's possible that she can become pregnant while Zechariah is punished for doubting for asking the same thing? Because Mary's question is predicated on not having sex at all, sex being the natural process through which babies are conceived. Her situation actually requires a miracle. The situation of Zechariah, a married man, does not. Since humans do not actually create life, we do not control whether any particular act of intercourse will or will not result in pregnancy. We can only cooperate with the biological systems God has given us, and if we want to avoid pregnancy, that means avoiding intercourse when scientific observation indicates that the female, whose fertility waxes and wanes, is fertile. Methods of contraception do not provide perfect security if a couple chooses to have sex while the female is fertile. God does not, with the exception of the Incarnation, will that conception take place outside of intercourse (which is why IVF and other assisted-reproduction methods are such grave evils), but pregnancy resulting from intercourse is not a miracle, contraception or no. 

NFP Requires Virtue
Read some news or opinion piece online, and you've almost certain to see advertisements for quick fix remedies: This simple exercise will get you totally ripped in five minutes a day! This little pill burns fat like nothing else! Local mom discovered this one simple trick!

The attraction of such claims is that they promise some desirable result that normally takes a lot of work (building muscle, losing weight, etc.) with very little work or time investment. The alternative is building the habit of actually eating well, exercising, etc. If you do that work, which is hard and requires forming good habits and having the discipline to keep them, you will not only achieve the goals of less fat or more muscle, but also side benefits such as sticking to a schedule, continuing to do things even if they are hard, etc.

The side benefits which are often cited in regard to NFP are sort of like these side benefits of eating right and exercising: if you go about NFP in the spirit of building good habits (a virtue, after all, is also described as a habit to the good) then practicing NFP will help you grow in virtue in other ways. Because NFP means, at times, saying as a couple: "It would be unhealthy for us (physically, emotionally, or financially) to get pregnant right now. I don't want to put my spouse through that. So I will not press my spouse for sex at this time. I will find ways to express my affection for my spouse that don't make my spouse crazy."

If you build these habits, you will find they apply in other areas as well. If I can not pester my wife for sex when I know she is probably fertile and is not ready to get pregnant, then I can also not pester her about the state of the house of the schedule of her activities. If I can not demand sex when it would cause a pregnancy we are not ready for, I can not demand sex when she is sick or is so pregnant that it is uncomfortable or is not in the mood. (I've read in the past that pregnancy and immediately after a baby are born are periods when husbands sometimes initiate affairs. This sounds incredibly heartless, but for couples who don't normally have to deal with periods of abstinence for any other reason, these might be the first times that a husband would encounter the necessity of not having sex for an extended period because of his wife's health.) If we can sit down and have a rational conversation about whether we are ready to get pregnant at the moment, and if not agree to abstain during potentially fertile periods, then we can sit down and have a rational conversation about what family time commitments to take on, where to spend our money, and whether we can afford that home renovation project.

But practicing NFP will only help in this development of virtue if one actually practices it in a virtuous way. If the desire to avoid pregnancy means that a couple utilizes self mastery and communication and consideration for each other, then they will strengthen these virtues in themselves and experience the benefits of these virtues in other areas of their lives. But we're fallen human creatures with fallen human desires. When we're faced with doing something hard, we often lash out at others to express our frustration. This isn't something unique to sex. Last weekend I was tilling over a section of the yard and digging out the area where I'll be building a retaining wall. It was hard work, harder that expected because the area was criss-crossed with roots. After a couple hours of hard labor with the sun overheard, if the kids came up with some question I was growling and snapping at them. My frustration with the roots and sun were turned, unvirtuously, into frustration with my children, and I treated them ungraciously as a result. Mastering our desires can also be hard work. If our response to that difficulty is to lash out at our spouse, to pester and accuse, to seek other forms of release, then facing this hard work becomes not a school of virtue but a school of vice.

Is NFP at fault here? No, not in and of itself. Ask about the reason that couples fight and you'll hear a couple standard ones: money, sex, relatives, work. All of these are things where we might have to make difficult decisions, have to allocate scarce resources, have to choose between competing desires. Put people under stress and force them to make choices, and at times they will respond by behaving badly. The rigors of practicing NFP are no different.

But is it an extra burden which no couple, or not all couples, should have to bear?

MrsD: Feelings are feelings and desire is desire. It arises unbidden at inconvenient times, or refuses to make an appearance at the right time. And it's unequal -- one spouse's desire may inspire the other, but it may also frustrate. So desire itself is not a good regulator of sexual life within marriage. But virtue is. The virtue of justice calls spouses out of themselves to render the particularly marital form of love that is intercourse even in spite of daily frustrations or the thousand stresses of life -- and to never withhold intercourse as a punishment. The virtue of temperance reins hotblooded spouses in from pushing the erotic  limits with degrading or sinful acts, or keeps one hotblooded spouse from pressuring the other to do something unwanted. The virtue of fortitude allows a married couple to be open and emotionally honest with each other even at the most vulnerable times, and sustains them through bouts of abstinence or the natural sexual imbalances that are a normal part of married life. 

And prudence, the queen of virtues, is the practical application of these virtues to every aspect of a couple's sex life. It takes the question of achieving or avoiding pregnancy from an abstract consideration (Is this a healthy time to get pregnant? Can we afford another child?) to the nitty-gritty choices couples make each instant. If I don't intend to get pregnant, but signs indicate that I'm fertile tonight, I should not have sex. If I should not have sex, I should be careful about the way I present myself to my husband (who is, of course, on the same page with me) so I'm not sending a false message. If I don't intend to have sex, and he doesn't intend to have sex, should I push at him this way? Should I touch him there? Should I let him do this particular thing which is awfully sexy? Prudence looks at each action, each moment, and allows me to exercise my judgment over whether this is a particularly wise action right now, or whether it's going to lead me closer to either a lot of frustration. Am I willing to gamble the chance of nine months of aches and pains and a delightful but demanding baby at the end on the chance of a moment of pleasure? If not, am I pushing myself toward a moment of insanity where I just don't care about the possible consequences? Is finally making the decision to have sex at this moment actually an act of love and surrender, or am I allowing lust to make a fool of me? Sex has a unitive aspect, but people can be united in making poor decisions. Prudence takes the facts gleaned from NFP observations and turns them into the moment-by-moment action or sacrifice that is the lived Christian life.  

NFP Is Not Impossible
Sometimes we like to imagine that things we don't like have horrific consequences.  NFP opponents sometimes claim that some couples or some men just can't deal with the periodic abstinence it requires. By this theory, the Church's teaching about contraception must be wrong because some couples both can't deal with abstaining during fertile periods and also can't deal with having lots of children, so if both of those are just out, just totally impossible for them, then obviously God must mean for those people to be allowed to use contraception. After all, marriage is supposed to be a source of joy, not of suffering!

We guys are notorious for claiming dire physical results for not being satisfied. "Oh, baby, it'll hurt if I don't!" Let's be clear, though: abstaining from sex is possible. No one ever died from lack of sex. Men who respond to the need for temporary abstinence by turning to porn, to masturbation, or to other women are not the victims of some sort of dire necessity. They are choosing to do the wrong thing. It's sometimes hard not to do the wrong thing. And as Catholics, we are given the sacrament of confession to turn to and receive both the forgiveness of our sins and the graces to avoid sinning again.  But the basic truth remains: doing the wrong thing is wrong.

And indeed, there are many others that we are in union with when we experience the difficulties of abstaining for a time. We have brothers and sisters in Christ who have not been able to find a spouse, who are separated by distance or death or health from their spouse, who have vowed celibacy for life, or who are in the time of waiting after meeting someone and before getting married. Many other people are having to make the same sacrifices that we are, and if they are without the tantalizing presence of the spouse with whom it would not be a sin to have sex, even if it would be imprudent in potentially causing a pregnancy which would be a risk to health or resources, those people also lack the compensations of at least being physically near someone whom they love.

God's grace is sufficient to the tests that are put before us.

MrsD: The first of the Ten Commandments is, "I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me." That sex is a good thing does not make it the greatest thing. That it is the form of love particular to marriage does not mean it is the only way, or the highest way, of showing love in marriage. That it is tantalizing, powerful, desirable does not mean that it is irresistible. In fact, we already know that sex is a limited, temporal, earthly form of love because in heaven, where love is perfected, there is no marriage or giving in marriage. Is it good to have sex in marriage? Yes, of course. Is it impossible not to have sex in marriage? No, of course not -- and as an example of this, we have the ultimate model of the family, the Holy Family, not plaster saints, but a real husband and wife living under conditions of celibacy. Through God's grace, they achieved this not by not desiring one another, not because they were too boring or holy or frigid to have sex (and although we know that Mary remained sinless, we're not given much of a window into Joseph's struggle except being told that he was a virtuous man), but by the actual, practical fact of abstinence. 

One thing we know: that God never commands us to sin. His will is perfect, and ours are not. We want things that are not right. We desire things that are not good. We desire good things, but at inappropriate times. We justify bad means on the theory that they will achieve good ends. We imagine that our particular circumstances give us some personal wiggle room within universally binding moral norms. Because we are human, we fall, sometimes through negligence and sometimes through actively rejecting the possibility of God's grace. But grace means that nothing God commands is an impossibility, even when it requires something as painful and humbling as setting our own imperfect wills aside.

***
Part 3 will deal with sex and the mistaken views about it that contribute to the difficulties in discussing the Church's teaching on contraception.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

My comment on Jennifer F.'s blog:

(A previous commenter said): Just by making NFP a standard thing implies that most of us will need it as a standard part of marriage, when all HV says is if there are serious motives to space out births, which derive from the physical or psychological conditions of husband and wife, or from external conditions, the Church teaches that it is then licit to take into account the natural rhythms immanent in the generative functions . Sounds like an optional thing to me.

Humanae Vitae also says that "With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person." It seems only appropriate that Catholic couples understand the biological processes by which their fertility is governed.

I agree that NFP classes are too long to present the necessary biological material. Still, it seems that a newly married couple would be prudent to realize that even if they are "eagerly anticipating children as quickly as their fertility allows", there may be events in the future which might necessitate spacing of children if only for a month or two. Implying that couples who use NFP prudentially (and with the church's blessing) are less open to life or don't trust God enough comes off as rather a childish slur.

The response:

mrs darwin, I have to respectfully disagree. m_david actually hit upon the exact reason that many Protestants simply cannot accept the teachings of the Catholic Church on this particular issue.

Please allow me to explain. If a couple is using NFP to space children, then they are abstaining from intercourse whenever the woman is ovulating. OTOH, if a couple is using a condom to space children, then they are probably having intercourse regardless of whether or not the woman is ovulating. The people using the condom are actually more likely to conceive than the couple using NFP.

So who's really more open to life?

FTR, I'm not arguing that Catholics should toss out Church teachings on this subject and go buy a pack of Trojans. However, under the circumstances, it does come across as a bit of a childish slur when Protestants are told by Catholics that we're not open to life, or that we're part of the culture of death, just because we use condoms instead of NFP. "Because the Church said so" does not make it a logical argument, and since I don't recognize the authority of the Catholic Church, the argument would have to be more logical to convince me.

The sound you hear is my head exploding.

Update: The sorely missed Opinionated Homeschooler replies as well:

Frankly the "open to life" argument for NFP always left me cold. I know Mormon couples who use contraceptive methods to space their families of six or more children. "Open to life" means anything and nothing.

The *only* reason to say yes to NFP and no to contraceptive methods is that Christians have always forbidden contraception, and condoms etc. are contraceptive while NFP is not. That this is unclear to many, Catholics and non-Catholics, is because of a fudging of the meaning of "contraception."

Contraception is a deliberate interference with the conjugal act so as to prevent pregnancy. Condoms so interfere; abstaining from intercourse does not, because there is no conjugal act to interfere with.

That's it. "Contraception" doesn't mean "having a contraceptive mentality" or "not being open to life" or "family planning." It may be that using NFP to avoid any children, or to limit children for selfish reasons, is a sin--but it's not the sin of contraception, and so to say that it "can be used with a contraceptive mentality" and that then "there is little difference between [NFP] and a condom" is simply muddying the moral waters.

Protestants are right to be offended by being told that by using artificial contraception they are "part of the culture of death" or "not open to life" or "using each other as sex objects" (I actually heard this used in an RCIA class, to the great offense of most of the potential converts present, and was later removed from the RCIA team for pointing out how offensive it was). There's no need for that kind of insulting hyperbole; all that needs to be said is that (a) condoms, the Pill, etc. are contraceptive (while NFP is not), by the meaning of "contraception" that's always been used; and (b) Christians from the earliest times have shunned contraception.

NFP: Not Just Natural Birth Control

If you think you've found the key to a better life, the most natural thing in the world is to want to rush out and convince everyone else to do likewise. We want to shout from the rooftops, "Hey! Better life to be found here! You can too!" As someone who finds significant meaning and happiness in the Catholic understanding of sexuality and prohibition of contraception, this view (and the approach to natural family planning that springs from it) is indeed something that I think other need to hear -- but as a result it's doubly frustrating when it seems like it's being "sold" wrong.

This is why my teeth went a little on edge when I ran into what ought to have been a very encouraging article to see in the Washington Post detailing the efforts of young and faithful Catholic women to re-explain the Church's teachings on contraception to the modern world. Here's the section that threw me off:

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.

“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that my limited experience of dealing with interviews is that what you say and the way you come off in the article are often very, very different. So I don't want to suggest that McGuire was misrepresenting NFP. It may well be that the WaPo writer talked to her for a long time, wrote up the article in good faith, yet ended up infusing it with an attitude that's just -- off.  (And indeed, I see that Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary (quoted elsewhere in the article) feels like what came across in the article is not exactly what she was trying to convey.)

That said, I think the message that the article conveys is problematic in that it simply doesn't reflect all that accurately what it's like using NFP, and when your advertising message doesn't fit the reality of your "product", user dissatisfaction is sure to follow. Emily Stimpson covers this well in a post titled Truth in Adverstising:

Let me be clear: I think it’s all sorts of great when young, attractive, faithful women talk to The Washington Post about contraception and NFP. And I totally get the importance of marketing and branding in this media age. We want people to know that NFP is not your grandmother’s rhythm method: It actually works. Nor is it your mother’s birth control pill: It doesn’t give you cancer or diminish your sex drive.

So what unsettles me?

Me, I guess. Me and my 11:45 a.m. battle with the brownie.

Like passing up turtle brownies, NFP requires self-control, temperance, and prudence. Only, it requires a heck of a lot more of each—more self-control, more temperance, more prudence, plus a ready knowledge of how to make chastity within marriage work. (I may be single, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that. Besides, I live in Steubenville, and my girlfriends talk about NFP as much as my sister’s friends talk about “Jersey Shore.” So…a lot.)

Regardless, temperance, prudence, and chastity aren’t virtues most people possess in spades anymore. Our culture, where instant gratification and over-indulgence are the norm, has seen to that.

At the same time, rejecting contraception in general requires trust—trust in God’s will and God’s provision. It requires generosity—a willingness to put others needs before our own. It requires a spirit of poverty—detachment from the extras our culture says are essentials. And it requires a heart that delights in pictures of fat smiling babies, that believes babies are precious gifts from God, not a reason to run for the hills.

Basically, it requires that we be everything our culture has programmed us not to be. That’s why NFP is a challenge for the most faithful couples I know, let alone those decidedly less faithful. Few are able to use it to space births with the same precision the manuals promise. Not because the methods don’t work. But rather because wills are weak and temptation is tempting. If a tiny tasty brownie can almost fell us, what can love and desire do?

Does that make NFP impossible or unrealistic? Of course not. Nevertheless, we should remain realistic about the fruit better branding can yield. We also should be realistic as we go about that branding.

No matter how savvy our marketing may be, NFP will remain a radical, counter-cultural choice, at least for the foreseeable future, because it asks…no, it demands that we reject our cultural programming and embrace a different way of thinking. Not simply about sex, but about everything: children, family, marriage, finances, work, God, desire, love, life’s purpose, life’s meaning, human freedom, the Divine Will, suffering, sacrifice. Again, everything.

NFP is not Catholic birth control. It’s the Catholic world view…lived out in the bedroom. [emphasis added]

The corrective is not some sort of bitter, "Oh I hate NFP. We can never have sex when we want to, half our kids were 'unplanned' and I never even feel like it during the infertile times, but it builds character, dammit, and it's about time people learned that marriage isn't all about self indulgence." That's not going to win any converts, and unless you allow yourself to be completely taken over by resentment (at which point people are able to make even unloading the dishwasher into some sort of Bataan death march of marital suffering) it's not even true. But living the NFP lifestyle -- which can be most briefly summed up as understanding that if one doesn't want to get pregnant at the moment, one is going to have to not have sex on some occasions when one would really like to -- takes effort and commitment. If you go into it with the idea, "all I want is to not have a baby right now" or even "all I want to do is control my fertility without using chemicals" it's going to seem pretty onerous.

With a difficult and commitment heavy process, success and satisfaction depend on actually learning to embrace the process itself, not just the goals. The people I know who look seriously fit are not the ones who hate exercising and eating well, but like to look good and so struggle through. Almost no one is able to put that much consistent effort into something he doesn't actually want to do. Success in that area comes from finding an athletic activity one can like and working up to the point where one actually wants to engage in it. That doesn't mean it isn't hard. But it's something hard that you want to do.

Using NFP is rewarding. It trains spouses into greater consideration for each other, a more communicative and other-focused sexuality, and a greater appreciation of the way that their love for each other ties intimately together with their parenthood. But it's no more a natural form of birth control than picking up a loaf of "organic" bread at Wal-Mart is the same as farming.

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 4 & Conclusion)

[Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

NFP and the Contraceptive Mentality

In concluding this series, I'd like to address the question which originally set me on on this overly extended journey: Is it possible for users of Natural Family Planning to have a "contraceptive mentality" and if so what does that mean in the context of NFP?

I've described the contraceptive mentality as: The idea that having sex and reproducing are two activities with no necessary connection, that having sex in no way suggests a desire or willingness to have children with the person you are having sex with.

At root, I think that NFP is formulated in such a way as to be in direct opposition to the contraceptive mentality. According to an understanding of sexuality rooted in human instinct and biological reality, the way to avoid conceiving children is to not have sex. This is also the means of avoiding conception which is considered acceptable by the Church in the context of its understanding of the moral nature of sexuality. NFP is considered morally acceptable by the Church for the reason that it consists of avoiding pregnancy by not having sex, with the modern refinement of allowing the married couple to understand with a certain degree of confidence when it is that they need to avoid having sex in order to avoid conception. Rather than abstaining all the time in order to avoid pregnancy, the couple can abstain for between a quarter and half out of the woman's cycle, and achieve the same result with relative certainty.

For us as human persons, this requires a degree of self mastery over our natural instincts. The modern NFP-using married couple finds itself in a situation (well housed and fed by historical standards, healthy, and lying in bed with a member of the opposite sex with whom one would certainly not object to having conjugal relations) which would seem to scream: Have sex! Reproduce! But for various prudent reasons arrived at by human reason, they may well consider it important at a given time to overcome that instinct and abstain for a portion out of each month in order to avoid having children for a time.

However, while this use of periodic abstinence to avoid pregnancy does not necessarily involve the contraceptive mentality, indeed emphasizes quite the opposite, I think that as NFP-using couples we do find ourselves subject to the temptations of the wider culture in this regard.

The assumption which has, over the last 80+ years since the use of artificial birth control became widespread, become so basic to our culture as to be completely unspoken and unconscious, even among those of us who see ourselves as standing in opposition to it, is that a happily married husband and wife will have a "good sex life" consisting of regular marital relations, sometimes passionate or creative, sometimes comfortable and familiar, which expresses the couples love and affection for one another. Even for those of us who see fertility as a part of our marriage equal to and related to conjugal bliss, it's nearly impossible to shake the feeling of, "We're married; we should be able to do this."

Some NFP guides try to soften and direct this frustration: During the fertile part of the cycle, if you are delaying pregnancy, is a great time for date nights and cuddling and other non-sexual expressions of affection.

The message seems to be that one should somehow be able to channel all of one's desire for sex into the non-fertile periods of the cycle. You, as an NFP user can have sex whenever you want, if only you can first have the first have the self control to only want it when you can have it! And you should be able to do this, because marriage isn't just about sex. Just be organized enough to schedule the non-sexual parts of your marital relationship for the fertile parts of the wife's cycle.

I think this overly optimistic view of NFP misses a basic understanding of human nature which we ignore to our own confusion and frustration: We are as creatures designed to "want" to reproduce a good deal more than we as thinking human beings desire to, and going against our instincts in this realm requires a degree of self denial which is often experienced as frustration or unhappiness. We are unlikely to feel entirely satisfied while practicing NFP because practicing it means denying our instincts.

This is particularly hard for us in the modern world because the understanding of sex which existed before the 20th century is remote and nearly irrecoverable for us -- the understanding which saw it as something of a double-edged sword, intensely pleasurable but at the same time as potentially high in cost. If the relationships of prior centuries often seem to our modern eyes a bit distant or dour, it is in part because it is impossible for us to recover the real sense of potential cost which applied to sexual intercourse -- both because pregnancy is less risky now and because even for those who have never in their lives used contraception the idea that "we should be able to have sex" is inescapable.

I don't think that this is in any way a strike against NFP. Certainly, it makes the spacing of children easier upon a couple than not having the ability to read the signs of fertility, and I think that the reduced sense of risk or fear surrounding sex is indeed a good thing for marital relationships. However, we must at the same time understand that in seeking to apply prudence to our reproduction, and do so without use of artificial means which separate sex and reproduction, we necessarily will have to exert a degree of self control which will result in some degree of difficulty and frustration. If we deceive ourselves that such things can be achieved without difficulty, we set ourselves up for nothing but frustration and disappointment.

For those of us who reject artificial contraception, not getting pregnant requires not having sex, and not having sex means denying one's natural desires, which, as any dieter can tell you, requires self denial which is not always pleasant.

Does NFP work? Do you see my 11 kids?

Someone on Facebook posed the question: "Why do all NFP teachers seem to have 5 kids?" It's a good question: if NFP works, why are these people always pregnant? One answer is that they want to have lots of children, which is a good thing but does raise the question of whether they practice the system they preach. But probably a more accurate answer is: do you know how many more kids we'd have without NFP?

So I did a little math on the subject I know best: myself. I have been married for 14 years minus 5 months, so 163 months. I had my first baby 15 months after I was married. My fertility returns, on average, 6 months postpartum (second child, 15 months younger than the first; and careful observation after the other four births bears that out). So, a fifteen month cycle between possible pregnancies. Had I not used NFP and gotten pregnant on a fifteen-month schedule, well, 15x11= 165. After being married for 162 months, I could be six months pregnant with my 11th child.

Let me restate that. I could have 11 children by my 14th anniversary without NFP. I will have six, almost half that number.

Now this isn't carved in stone. One won't necessarily get pregnant in a given cycle; I myself have gone several cycles without conceiving even when I was trying to. (Observation says that results in boys, BTW.) But you can't know that except in hindsight, and I do know that I can get pregnant even when I'm trying not to conceive; it's happened three times. (Observation: A girl, a miscarriage, and a girl.)

After the surprise of my second pregnancy, all my children have been spaced with NFP. The second closest spacing is 22 months -- still closer than I'd intended, but far saner and healthier than a 15-month spacing. As I get older and my pregnancies get tricksier, that spacing -- and the physical condition it allows me to recover -- become more vital. I was only 23 once.

So, I'm not an NFP instructor, but people may see my six kids and wonder, "Does NFP work?" And the answer is, "Do you see my 11 kids? No? Then I can assure you that it does."

A Few Thoughts on NFP

Sometimes you run across an argument which strikes you as wrong in such a way as to crystallize and clarify your thinking on a topic. Such a case, for me, was running into this debate from last week at InsideCatholic on the topic, "Is NFP Misogynous?"

The "yes it is" argument contained the following key elements:

Assuming any methodized sexual intercourse devised to avoid pregnancy by an otherwise open-to-life-marital-couple can actually "work," who bears responsibility for the method? I seriously question whether NFP, for many, isn't a misogynous practice -- imposing upon women an undue share of the physical and emotional burden of the theologically questionable quest of planning pregnancy.

First, we must be real. Modern NFP practices demand daily bodily measurements of women, not men.... A woman most desires sexual intimacy when she is at her most fertile.... This is also the moment when we are most likely to conceive a child. It's the moment NFP-practicing women measure and chart and predict as "fertility awareness," a "maybe-child" zone. For NFP-practicing women avoiding pregnancy, it is the moment they must say "no" to both themselves and their spouses....

I don't buy it. It sounds like a scheme to impose on women who wish to time pregnancies an almost penal practice of self-measurement, self-control, and self-denial, while requiring, at a minimum, a sort of suffering acquiescence from a spouse whose interest in the chart becomes rather strategic....

NFP needs to go the same way as the rhythm method -- which did not "work" and was, more importantly, female unfriendly. In its place, perhaps we all need to suck it up and admit what the theology asks of us: Have sex whenever you both want to... and expect a baby every time. Otherwise, don't copulate. That's a fair burden on both spouses.

The woman presenting the "no it isn't" view did a perfectly decent job of presenting the standard arguments for NFP, but I'd like to dig into one aspect in particular, especially given that by the sixth comment on the article we already see a theology student trying to argue that the "planning" involved in Natural Family Planning is really no different than the use of barrier methods of contraception since it involves "the intention of having sex without baby" and is thus "using one's intellect to create a tool which limits the possibility of procreation".

I'd like to start from a point of biological realism. The bodily organs which are used in this very pleasant thing we call sex are part of the reproductive system, which means than whenever we have sex we are performing an action which is at a biological level meant to be reproductive, in the sense that our bodies would not have this capacity were it not for the fact their function is reproductive in nature. (Interesting side note: think of all the most pleasurable things the human body can do and ask yourself, how does each one of these relate to a basic element of human survival. Generally speaking, the greater the physical pleasure, the greater the relation to survival.)

Within the overall structure of intercourse, a normal, healthy man is capable of begetting children any time he has sex. However, women (like females of virtually all other mammals) are only biologically able to conceive a few days out of the month. (Both of these reproductive strategies make a lot of sense for the individual and the species as a whole at the evolutionary level, but I don't think it's necessary to go into all that here.) Even at the "right time", a woman may or may not conceive as the result of having intercourse. Conditions have to be right for the sperm to reach the egg, the egg has to be healthy, and the sperm has to successfully implant. What this boils down to is that while the probability of getting pregnant from any one random act of intercourse is perhaps 1-10% depending on the people involved, having sex frequently will almost invariably result in pregnancy unless there is a health/age problem involved.

Other creatures, our non-rational brethren in the animal kingdom, do not worry about when they should not reproduce. Driven by instincts and natural compulsions, they mate when it is their season, have as many offspring as they can, and hope (if one may apply that word to the unthinking) that those offspring will thrive. If there are not enough resources to go around, the young, weak, and old die off. We humans see this kind of suffering as something to be avoided, and so human societies in all times and places have striven not to outgrow their resources -- using methods ranging from self denial to slaughter.

From a Catholic point of view, human life is sacred and thus abortion and infanticide are completely unacceptable as means of population control; and the sexual faculties have a moral integrity resulting from their relation to the creation of new human beings and so the sex act should not be modified (as with birth control) to remove its inherent fertility. Thus, for Catholics, the answer to the need not to have more children than one can provide for is to have sex less. Because sex has a clear and inherent reproductive aspect, which we consider it wrong to try to circumvent artificially, if you want to not get pregnant you will have to avoid having sex at least some of the time.

Now, this is where the question of whether Natural Family Planning (NFP) as practiced by modern Catholic couples is "natural" comes in. The woman's body gives certain signs of when it is likely to be fertile. These signs are rather less obvious than those of many of our fellow mammals. Female chips, for instance, have a large pink swelling around their genital area when they become fertile, such that one can tell if she is fertile from quite some distance away.

Signs of human female fertility are much more subtle. (The evolutionary reason for this would make a very interesting inquiry, I can think of a few very interesting reasons.) However they are now pretty well understood and easily learned.

So, what are the options for the Catholic couple who are seeking to remain true to the Church's understanding of human sexuality and the human person and also seeking to avoid having more children then they can raise and support?

Ms. Campbell advises, "Have sex whenever you both want to... and expect a baby every time. Otherwise, don't copulate. That's a fair burden on both spouses."

The thing is (leaving aside the dangerous problem of trying to figure out what is "fair" for both spouses in some sort of power politics sense) that this is in a sense not actually all that natural. We are not made such that sex results in a baby "every time". Sex is somewhat likely to result in a baby perhaps 30% of the time, and highly likely to do so only about 10% of the time at best. Since unlike a lot of our fellow creatures, our sex drives are not only "on" when we're fertile, the rest of the time sex serves to strengthen and deepen the bond between a couple who are going to have a lot of work and difficulty together raising children. So if you only, ever have sex when you absolutely expect to have a baby, you're actually using sex in a more minimal fashion than we're physically designed for.

If they know anything at all about their biology (from experience if nothing else) a couple is going to know they won't get pregnant every time. And knowing this, the drive is strong to say, "Surely this time is okay." Though husbands should try hard to be sensitive to the greater difficulties that pregnancy means for their wives than for them, this line of thinking is naturally going to appeal more to the man than to the woman. Desires for "fairness" aside, pregnancy is naturally going to effect the woman more directly than the man.

Given that we have the understanding of female fertility signs available to us quite easily in the modern world, it is going to cause significantly less stress without couples to use that knowledge to actually know "we might get pregnant now" versus "we almost certainly won't get pregnant now" rather than relying the more more amorphous "chances are decent we won't get pregnant this one time" or the inaccurate "we shouldn't have sex unless we're absolutely sure we want to get pregnant."

NFP works within the natural structure of what sex is -- a natural act which has both unitive and procreative elements. It encompasses self denial in that it accepts that if you want to avoid pregnancy for a while you are going to have to forgo having sex, but it provides system and achievability to that self denial by telling a couple when it is that they need to forgo sex. If you need to avoid having another child for the next year or two, you may end up having to avoid having sex nearly half the time. However, that is much more achievable and healthy for a couple than attempting to avoid it entirely for those same years -- and the differentials of fear and desire that would result from such an attempt.

The Fruitfulness of Truth

This is not the NFP post I was going to write for Natural Family Planning Awareness Week.

I had an insight yesterday, something that I thought expressed something true about NFP and its application, especially in the postpartum period. (Bear in mind, when I write, that baby is seven months old this week and that signs have been ambiguous since before he was four months old -- the sort of pattern that is infertile in retrospect, but makes every day a decision point for a couple not willing to risk conception right now, as we are most unitedly not.) I thought I might write about it, but I wanted to talk it over with Darwin first, because it is a good policy to talk over one's planned public discussion of sex with one's spouse. The resulting conversation (and non-conversation) showed me that the point was hurtful to him, though that wasn't my intention, and I wished I'd bitten my tongue and kept the reflection in my heart (as I'd halfway intended to do anyway) rather than bringing up something that could have been construed as a criticism.

I hurt Darwin not because I'm malicious or bitter or abnormal, but because my insight tangentially touched on the fact that no human couple can possibly fill all of another person's needs. That's true of the most virtuous, most balanced, best-suited marriage (the Darwins, in short). I hurt Darwin because what I said underscored my own humanity, that I am broken not even by sin (though by that too) but by the limitations of my body in this world. But it wasn't unreasonable or wrong of him to feel that pain. In marriage, when the two become as one and your flesh becomes my flesh, there can't really be any, "It's not you, it's me." Everything is a reflection on the other, which is why small comments become big fights and one's person's small actions can have such an outsized effect, positive or negative, on the other. But if we're both doing our best, and we both fall short, and our problem is not sin that can rejected, then how can this be reconciled? When even our best, most virtuous human efforts fall short, what recourse is there other than isolation and civil silence?

The only solution is to confide ourselves and our marriages deep in the heart of Jesus, who is the only person who can ever fulfill all needs. Every earthly marriage, friendship, parenthood, childhood, will fail, because no mother can be everything, no father can be everything, no wife or husband or friend can meet every physical, mental, and spiritual need. The only way to grow into a deeper relationship with someone is to trust in God to repair and better our deficiencies, and then to constantly be willing to lay down our lives so that He may take them up again. Not closing ourselves off, but constantly opening and stretching ourselves in him.

***

Truth is, I think, the key application of NFP. Naturally, the observation of cycles and the day-to-day decisions about sex, the health of the body, the respect for the body's natural capabilities, and a lack of delusion about our capacity to control all aspects of reproduction: all these are important aspects of Natural Family Planning, by whatever system one practices it. NFP is not perfect, not because of the "failure rate" or because someone's cycle is just too crazy to chart or because abstaining from sex can be really really hard or because of some inherent flaw in the concept. It's imperfect because everything this side of heaven is imperfect. It's imperfect because spouses are imperfect. Look around and you'll find that the relationships in which each person believes the other can totally fulfill all needs are the newest ones, the least mature ones, the ones untried by shared suffering, shared joys, shared daily life, without true judgment about real life and real people.

The reason to practice NFP, or to live a Christian life, despite the difficulties and the inevitable hardships, is that truth and openness and virtue will always bear fruit in a way that lies, misdirection, or taking the easy way cannot. The fruit may seem stunted or worthless or bitter at first. Or it may ripen immediately and be appealing to the senses and the will. But either way, it is divine, and participating in the will of God is never an empty exercise. We sow where we will not reap. We harvest what we did not sow. Between the sowing and the harvesting, which can be human activities, is the hand of God, mending our imperfect efforts. We transform our works and joys and sufferings in Him, and He transcends our flaws and our seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

***

Here's what happened. We were able to talk about last night's discussion a bit more freely over email today, once the immediate rawness had worn off. The pain I caused wasn't the destructive damage of a malicious, sinful action, but the constructive damage of a muscle being exercised. That muscle will repair itself if it is given rest and nourishment. The rest, I think, is key -- we didn't have to hash out every detail of this idea at that very moment, something that could have really strained our relationship as we both tried to justify our points of view. The work of being married doesn't have to be achieved in a moment of catharsis. It takes a lifetime of listening and adjusting, revisiting and rebuilding, and in making the good, hard decisions every day, and every night.

NFP and Authority

Melinda Selmys writing at the blog Catholic Authenticity has a post up which she says will be the first of several laying out her thoughts on NFP and the Catholic Church's moral teachings dealing with contraception, thoughts she intends to turn into a book when they are fully formed.

In this initial post, the primary problems are not, actually, with her assessment of NFP per se, but rather with how she approaches Catholic teaching. She begins with what she says she originally thought to the justification for the Church's prohibition on birth control (and allowing of NFP.)

I’ve been promising forever to write a book about NFP. It got massively derailed a couple of months back, basically because I hit major stumbling block: one of my major theses had, up to that point, been that the burdens that Catholic couples are often called upon to bear as a result of the Church’s teaching were justified by a set of larger concerns. Basically, that we were being asked to shoulder a heavy cross because of the magnitude of the issues at stake. The breakdown of the family. The increasing vilification of children as a “burden on the planet.” Widespread abortion. The reality of eugenics, which would have been a very concrete and grave issue for Paul VI and other churchmen of his generation.

The argument, as it ran in my head, was that a strong statement needed to be made because otherwise it would be impossible to take an effective stand against these other problems. Frankly, I’m pretty well able to get my head around the idea that the involuntary sterilization of the disabled, the extermination of the Downs’ community in utero, and the impoverishment and isolation of women and children as a result of “sexual liberation,” are all much greater forms of suffering than struggling with NFP. And so long as I thought these were the issues at stake, I was okay with the idea of being told that I had to take my place on the front lines, and to hold my position for as long as was humanly possible.

The author intends this as a "here was the good reason I thought the Church had before I realized the real motivation" view, but I'd argue that this is actually hugely problematic. Think about what's being suggested here, that the Church taught that using contraception was wrong in order to send a symbolic message rejecting the various evils common in the culture relating to sexuality. This, however, would be a utilitarian rationale: We need to send a strong message about sexuality, so we're going to announce that using contraception is a sin as a symbolic gesture to make a point.

Now, many people have said that the Church's teaching is in fact a powerful symbol of opposition to the culture's degraded understanding of sexuality. That may be true. But that isn't the reason for the teaching. It is, if anything, a sort of side benefit.

Keep in mind, the Church does not tell us not to use contraception as a useful discipline. It is not like the command to do some penance (such as not eating meat) on Fridays. The Church says that using contraception is intrinsically evil, an action wrong in and of itself. (Other examples of intrinsic evils include lying, torture, rape, and abortion.) If the Church said this not because it believed that using contraception was wrong but rather to make a rhetorical point, the Church would be acting falsely and viciously. Indeed, if the Church were to do this while claiming to exercise her solemn teaching office, the Church would prove herself to be something other than what the Church claims to be. The Church would be false.

I don't think that Selmys has followed this line of reasoning through to that conclusion. After all, this is the explanation for the Church's teaching which she thought was reasonable. But as she charts her disillusion it's important to see the problems with the starting point and with a vision of the leaders of the Church sitting down and saying to themselves, "Hmm. We need to make some big gesture showing how everything is wrong with the modern world's approach to sexuality. I know! Let's say that using contraception is a sin!"

Selmys continues:

So, I wanted to get historical support for this thesis and naturally my research led me to the Papal Birth Control Commission.

And that’s when the I totally lost my shit.

Because the bottom line for the guys who seemed to be responsible for the decision to promulgate the teaching as it was promulgated wasn’t any of those important issues that I mentioned above. They got a mention, sure, but there were actually reasonably good arguments put forward on the other side to suggest that the Church’s ability to effectively combat the evils described above was actually going to be compromised by an overly absolutist approach to contraception.
...
They spelled out the reason quite explicitly in their minority report:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 [when Casti Connubii was promulgated] and in 1951.

It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which Popes and Bishops have either condemned, or at least not approved.

In other words: if we admitted that we were wrong it would make us look bad, it would make the Protestants look good, and it would undermine our authority.

That was the bottom line. Not abortion. Not the casual and irresponsible use of women for men’s sexual gratification outside of marriage. Not eugenics. But the authority of men who do not ever have to bear the brunt of the teaching.

What we have here, I would argue, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Church's function is in transmitting Christian doctrine. Selmys finds it shocking that those on the papal commission who wrote the minority report said the Church could not declare the use of contraception moral when the Church had previously taught it to be immoral. However, contrary to what many outside (and some inside) the Church seem to believe, the Church does not decide matters of doctrine. Rather, the Church was founded by Christ in order to preserve and pass on His teachings through all history. To aid in this, Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would protect the Church from teaching error.

If the Church at one time taught that using contraception was immoral, and then later taught that it was moral, the Church would be directly contradicting itself. This is not like some human institution changing its policy on an issue. It's not a matter of those "in power" not wanting to end up with egg on their face and admit they were wrong. Given the Church's self understanding, if the Church were to directly contradict its past teaching, the Church would basically render itself void. Those tasked with the Church's teaching authority thus understand that part of the work that they are called to do in preserving and transmitting Christ's teaching to the world is, when examining some question, to determine whether the proposed teaching would contradict past teaching in some way or whether it would simply serve as a clearer application of what has always been taught.

When the papal commission on contraception examined the topic, both the majority (pro contraception) and minority (anti contraception) group realized this. The majority tried to argue that modern means of contraception and a modern understanding of sexuality and fertility in the context of a married couple's overall lifetime, was such that the Church could approve the use of contraception without contradicting past teaching. The minority argued that this was not the case. Paul VI evidently sided with the minority.

So when the minority argued that to approve contraception would contradict past teaching, it was not engaging in some sort of face-saving operation. It was doing what Christ commissioned the Church to do: preserving his teachings unchanged.

If we assert, as Selmys suggests, that "the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 [when Casti Connubii was promulgated] and in 1951" we're basically asserting that the Catholic Church is not what it says it is, that it does not authentically transmit the true doctrines of Christ when it teaches on matters of faith and morals. Because, again, according to the Church's self understanding, it is not at liberty to simply make doctrines up. The Church is not a debating society in which people examine the available evidence, decide what is probably true, and promulgate that as a doctrine. The Church has the authority only to preserve and explicate the truth which was given to it by Christ.

This question of how the Church arrives upon an understanding of doctrine relates to another issue which upsets Selmys:

More distressingly, many of the proponents of the traditional teaching, at one time or another, openly admitted that the natural law arguments they were using didn’t actually hold up to rational scrutiny. And we have records of private correspondence showing that they were more than willing to engage in a certain amount of Machiavellian political maneuvering in order to get their agenda pushed through.

For me, this was extremely distressing.
One of the things that attracted me to the Catholic faith in the first place, and that solidified my Catholic identity in the period immediately after my conversion, was the constant claim of Catholic apologists that the faith was fundamentally rational. That if you were only willing to honestly follow the argument with good will, you would arrive at the conclusions put forward by the Church. The realization that the teaching on contraception had been promulgated and promoted by people who knew that the argumentation did not actually hold water meant that on a fundamental level this teaching did not result from a commitment to following an argument in good faith.

Now, supposedly that was okay because the Holy Spirit could guide the leaders of the Church to infallibly promulgate true conclusions out of faulty argumentation. Right out of the gate, that’s a bit of a swallow for me because it seems to undermine the claim that faith is reconcilable with reason. Reason will always reject a conclusion once the premises are found to be false. It may return to that conclusion later, should other evidence be found to substantiate it, but to simply barrel on through on the assumption that better proofs are sure to show up eventually is just a blatant exercise in the kind of irrational faith that atheists rightly complain about.

But again, the function of the Church is not to think its way to some exciting new doctrines based on really good arguments. The Church does not invent doctrines at all, its job is merely to preserve and clarify them. This can at times mean that the Church will find itself in the position of defending true doctrines with bad arguments. The Holy Spirit does not protect the Church from making bad arguments, just from teaching false doctrine. And because the Church is not the inventor of doctrine, the truth of the doctrine itself is not dependent of the ability of the Church to explain why a particular doctrine is true.

Think about other moral doctrines.  It is a doctrine of the Catholic Church that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman.  Polygamy is wrong.  Marrying someone of your own sex is wrong.  Are the arguments for these doctrines good and convincing?  Some people may believe that they are, some may believe they are not.  We do believe that these moral laws are available to human reason.  It is possible for someone, using natural reason, to come to an understanding of how marriage should properly be between only two people and only people of the opposite sex.  However, the fact that these truths are available to human reason does not necessarily mean that the path will be obvious to all people at all time.  And while the Church is promised the ability to preserve these true teachings, it is by no means assured that the very human people who are serving as the shepherds of God's flock at any given time will successfully identify and deploy the arguments which will be convincing to the great mass of people at any given time.

Is the faith fundamentally rational?  Yes, it is.  It is, first of all, not contrary to reason.  We do not assert mutually contradictory things as true.  The Church will not tell you to believe X and Not-X simultaneously.  (Indeed, it is precisely to avoid this sort of contradiction that the Church looks carefully to avoid contradicting itself, as the minority report did in the preparation of Humanae Vitae.)  However, the fact that the faith is rational does not necessarily mean that each and every person, with that person's biases and experiences, will find the necessary arguments to prove to himself the doctrines of the faith from first principles. 

I want to write a couple posts in collaboration with MrsDarwin addressing some of the actual points about NFP which were brought up in this post and others by Selmys and some of her circle.  However, with this post in particular, it seems to me that the biggest issue is not in fact NFP or contraception, but the very question of the Church's doctrinal authority. 

Fertility Blaming

I was out at a conference during the middle of this week, and one evening I found myself at a beer hall lifting one liter mugs of German-style beer with a couple of other attendees.

The fact that I have seven children came up, and one of the guys I was talking to (it was an all male group) choked on his beer. "Seven kids? Are you serious? I've got two, and that is enough. My wife asked about having more, but I told her: I've got a lawyer on speed dial. No more kids or I am out of here."

Now, one should take words after a liter or more of beer with a grain of salt, perhaps nice large salt crystals on a warm soft pretzel. One hopes that this fellow does not literally keep a divorce lawyer on speed dial. But the mentality, even if spoke of more boldly due to the alcohol, is worth thinking about.

One of the complaints that I've often heard about the use of NFP to space pregnancies among Catholics is that NFP ends up being "all the woman's job". The wife is left to track her signs and deny her husband sex if they want to avoid pregnancy, while the husband blames her for denying him and complains that it's all too hard.

As we've written on various occasions: if that's how NFP plays out, it highlights much deeper problems in the marriage. A wife is not simply a tool for her husband's sexual satisfaction, nor should decisions about any important topic in marriage me made and lived out in that kind of lopsided way.

It often seems that the grass is greener on the other side, and that if only Catholics could ease their way out of the Church's moral objections to artificial birth control, everything could be easy and happy. But as this conversation (hardly the only time I've heard these kind of sentiments expressed) blaming a wife for her fertility and making it explicitly her problem is hardly a vice which is peculiar to the practice of NFP. It's a wider human problem, which the use of birth control to some degree allows people to paper over.

However much the existence of birth control may allow people to imagine otherwise, having children is a natural result of having sex. (And goodness knows, over the years I've had plenty of work acquaintances whose children have been the result of getting pregnant even while using birth control.) If a man chooses to have sex, he's choosing to engage in an act which may (however unlikely it may be under current conditions) result in a child. When he gets married he's entering a relationship that could well result in children, and to pretend that this is somehow all the women's fault or responsibility is both hiding from reality and engaging in a selfish relationship dynamic.

Moral Bandages over Moral Outrages

It is said, with truth, that the Church is not a preserve for the holy, but rather a hospital for sinners. That's good, because we're all sinners, and the Church does indeed offer us both God's law, which tells us how to live to a holy life, and the graces of the sacraments which make it possible for us to follow the path of virtue. This is important to remember in a culture which makes much of 'meritocracy'. We do not earn our own salvation through our own virtue. Grace is given to us freely and unearned. All we have to do is be willing to cooperate with it.

And yet, this hospital imagery often seems to attract those wedded to another idea, people who see the Church not as a hospital in which people are healed of their sins, but as a sort of homeopathic clinic in which people take vanishingly small doses of trendy virtue and then insist that they are healed, without believing that any real application of the Church's powers of healing is necessary.

This struck me today when I ran into a piece of the "here's what's wrong with the Church's teaching on contraception" genre. MrsDarwin and I have both written posts over the years dealing with NFP and the overly rosy way in which it is sometimes pitched as the solution to all ills: improving communication and filling your marriage with romance and divorce proofing your relationship all in one happy-happy system. This, of course, is not true. Natural Family Planning is a means of very much decreasing (or used the other way, increasing) a couple's chances of getting pregnant by timing when in the wife's cycle they have sex. It is considered a moral means of spacing or avoiding pregnancy by the Church, and like any discipline the practice of it can (undertaken in a virtuous spirit) be a way of growing in moral strength and virtue, but it's by no means magic.

But making the equal and opposite error to this magical thinking approach, there seems to be a mini-genre these days of pieces arguing that the Church's teachings on sexuality must be changed because using NFP is too hard and so people should have the option of using artificial birth control instead. Often, what these articles propose to do is apply birth control as some token cure to a relationship which sounds to have much deeper problems. This is no exception. The author describes the plight of a friend as follows:

My friend is a wonderful person, a devout Catholic, and very pro-life. She and her husband were using NFP, and had been for years. Unfortunately, over the course of her married life, my friend has suffered several traumatic miscarriages. She has struggled with severe depression and PTSD related to pregnancy loss. In addition to her miscarriages, she also has four living children who suffer from a variety of physical and emotional ailments. Her children have been in and out of specialists’ offices, therapist appointments, and hospitals. Given these circumstances, her anxiety surrounding the possibility of another pregnancy was extreme. It seemed like every time we got together, all she was able to talk about was how afraid she was of becoming pregnant. To make matters worse, her husband had minimal tolerance for the periodic abstinence required by NFP. The possibility of her becoming pregnant was actually quite high. I began to be afraid that, if she did become pregnant, she would attempt to commit suicide.

Now think for a moment about what's being said here: Her friend has suffered multiple, traumatic miscarriages and is terrified she will get pregnant, so terrified that the author fears the friend will commit suicide if she gets pregnant. And yet the friend's husband has "minimal tolerance" for the restrictions of his free access to sex whenever he wants it which might result from practicing some periodic abstinence.

If this is an accurate account of the relationship, isn't it a horrifically bad one? If the topic were anything other than sex and contraception, and you think of an area of activity where it would be considered okay for a husband to have "minimal tolerance" for something essential to prevent his wife's bodily harm or suicide? Could insisting on sex which seemed likely to lead to such grave consequences seem like anything short of abuse?

To drive her point home, the author recounts:

One weekend in early autumn, I suggested that we take a trip out to the Blue Ridge, just the two of us, to go apple picking. I hoped that an afternoon away would give her a respite from her anxiety, and a change in routine, though I also knew that it was only going to be a temporary break. As we drove away from the city, we were chatting cheerfully about recipes and movies we’d seen recently. But the time we were driving home, tired after an afternoon out, we had returned to the familiar subject.

As we neared home, she became more anxious, and she finally told me that she had decided that if she became pregnant, she was going to have an abortion. I was not shocked. I knew how much she feared another miscarriage, and I knew how wholly overwhelmed she felt. I also knew that this would be absolutely catastrophic for her. She was passionately pro-life. She was terrified of losing another child. For her to have an abortion would, I felt, simply be a step on the way to her becoming suicidal.

I told her that I thought that this was the time for her and her husband to consider using contraception. I didn’t say this lightly. I have my religious commitments. In the back of my mind, I was hoping that using contraception would be temporary, something to give her peace of mind so that she could have some time to heal before going back to following the Church’s teachings. But I knew that contraception was absolutely necessary to her, at least short term. Things could not go on the way they were heading. She needed a break from constant fear.

So the friend is driven to the point of considering abortion as her only way out if she gets pregnant, and the author thinks this would be just a stop on the way to suicide. And yet, her solution to for a friend whose husband is apparently driving her thoughts of abortion and/or suicide is not, "You should get help. He's treating you badly," but rather, "You should use artificial birth control against your moral convictions so that you can keep giving him the sex he demands."

For the Church to act this way would not be acting as a moral hospital, because to act this way is not to offer healing. This is the moral equivalent of putting a few drops of essential oils on a gaping chest wound and saying, "Be healthy!" The husband in this scenario is being treated as some impersonal force of nature, but he needs to have the full moral weight of the Church's teaching power turned on him, telling him that he is treating his wife badly and needs to do better.

The author reports that she had a few moral worries about her advice to her friend, so she discussed it with two priests:

Part of me was, and is, certain that the advice I gave was good. But, I am prone to scrupulosity, and so I soon made an appointment to talk with my parish priest. He was very encouraging. He told me that things happen that are very difficult for couples. Sometimes, this really is the best advice for a given situation, even if the Church’s teaching is true. I was relieved, but my conscience was not satisfied. We had talked so long that I had run out of time, and I didn’t get to ask him to hear my confession. My conscience was still bothering me, and it sent me to confession to a different priest when I was traveling a few weeks later.

This priest had a different assessment of the situation. He told me that I had not said the right thing. He said that this was something that my friend and her husband had to work out on their own. He also told me that I could not control whether or not my friend committed suicide, and I shouldn’t try. All I could do, he said, was make sure that she committed suicide in a state of grace, without the sin of contraception on her soul.

I consider this the worst advice I have ever been given. I was shocked. I was horrified. I have been re-evaluating my relationship to the Church’s teaching on sexuality ever since.

One priest offered a way of accompaniment. He encouraged me to accompany my friend, and offered to speak to her himself. He did not reject the Church’s teaching outright, but he did advocate flexibility.

The other priest insisted on rigor, and he considered women’s lives an acceptable price to pay for this purity and rigor. All the criticisms that the Church devalues women seemed to be vindicated by his words.

Now, one should never rule out the possibility that people are deeply confused or stupid or even just plain wicked, so I can't say that it's impossible that the second priest said what the author recounts him as saying. But let's be clear, the statement that all she could do was, "was make sure that she committed suicide in a state of grace, without the sin of contraception on her soul." has to be either the author's hyperbolic misrepresentation of what the priest said, of the product of a deeply, deeply confused priest. To commit suicide is itself one of the gravest sins possible. That is why for much of the Church's history it was the practice to refuse a Christian burial to those who committed suicide. Modern practice varies from this out of respect for the possibility that a person who commits suicide may well repent and ask God's forgiveness in the moment of death. Surely God could welcome into His present event such a late repenting person.

So the idea that we are responsible for making sure that someone commits suicide in a virtuous state is a complete crock. If the priest did indeed say that, he's wrong in an incredibly disturbing way.

That said, there's a really big problem with the author's reasoning that she's defending, and it has to do with the way in which too often people do not treat all moral prohibitions as if we really mean them.

I'm reminded of an incident many years ago when a friend who was vegan was visiting. Knowing that he was vegan, we made extra efforts to make sure that no meat, fish, dairy, etc. were served. Then we were shocked to hear him relate an anecdote about eating meat recently. When we asked him about it, he said, "Well, you know. I usually don't eat meat. But if it's really inconvenient..."

But if we take any kind of moral prohibition seriously, that's not how our morals work. Something which is seriously wrong does not become okay because there's a compelling practical reason for doing it. Often we're tempted to think that way, especially with sins that seem particularly socially acceptable at the moment. But pick a sin which we rightly have a moral horror of right now, but which might have passed as darkly romantic in the past:

You come upon young Wolfgang prowling picturesquely back and forth along the battlements of a brooding Gothic castle. Wolfgang says to you, "I am so consumed with desire for Federicka that I am tempted to throw myself from these battlements and make an end of it all! But still she refuses me. I saw here in the street the other day, and I thought of seizing her and forcing myself on her. But no, that would be a sin. And so I walk the battlements and wonder if I should kill myself." Do you tell Wolfgang that he should seize Federicka and have his way with her, lest he be tempted to do some desperate outrage upon himself? Or do you take it as your job to make sure that he commits suicide while innocent of the sin of rape? NEITHER! To assault the fair Federicka would be wrong. To kill himself would be wrong. You cannot encourage either one. You cannot enjoin one to avoid the other. His claim that refraining from the one sin may force him to commit the other is a false claim. He is at moral liberty to do neither and if you are going to "accompany" him, you need to accompany him in doing neither of these terrible things.

If we can see the flaw in the moral logic of Wolfgang's Gothic struggle, we should be able to see the flaws in the quandaries trotted out here: We better approve of birth control or she'll abort. We better approve of birth control or she'll commit suicide.

Perhaps the readiness to engage in these kind of trades shows that even for a lot of Catholics who say they take the Church's teaching on contraception seriously actually think of not using artificial birth control as a sort of moral taste rather than an actual moral law. If we treat using birth control like a vegan who eats meat for convenience when traveling, we don't actually think it's a sin.

I do think that using artificial birth control is a sin, and that's precisely why we can't engage in some sort of moral barter, blessing one sin on the argument that it will make it possible to avoid another.

We are sinners, in that we have all sinned. But it is also possible for all of us, with God's help, not to sin. A husband can not pressure his wife for sex when he knows it is contrary to her physical and mental health. A wife can resist the urge to kill herself or her child, even when the world seems to be imploding around her. However fallen we are, God always will give us the strength to not sin if we ask for his grace and if we do our own part by using our active will to choose not to do what is wrong.

What we must not do is try to turn the Church into a fake hospital, putting a frail human bandage and a few murmured words of "accompaniment" over a wound which needs real healing.

NFP: Magic 8 Ball edition

Baby's less than six months old, and I've already taken a pregnancy test.

I won't string you all along: it was negative. I sat staring at the lone line in the test window, almost shaking with relief. Oh, thank God, I murmured. Thank God.

But MrsDarwin! you say. If you don't want to get pregnant, why don't you just abstain? Aren't you using NFP -- shouldn't you know when you're fertile? Anyway, aren't you breastfeeding?

Let me say it here, once and for all: NFP may be a science, but practicing it in daily life is an art. And figuring out returning fertility is enough of a crapshoot that I sometimes think I'd get more clarity if I stopped taking my temperature and just shook the Magic 8 ball every morning.


Can we all be honest here? There are better and there are worse times to be pregnant; this would have been a worse time. Financially, we could have afforded another child. Physically, it would have been difficult, but I could have managed. Mentally -- I'm pretty resilient; I would have adjusted quickly to the idea of another baby. We don't have a "life or death" reason not to conceive, whatever that means. But I have a newborn and I'm still adjusting to life with four, and I simply don't want to be pregnant now.

I didn't worry about this stuff back in the days when I innocently assumed that if you were doing ecological breastfeeding your fertility would just take a happy vacation (maybe because people who encourage ecological breastfeeding push this line). My shimmering bubble of ignorance was popped real quick by two pink lines. Now I find that the first six months postpartum are a rather anxious time. It would be almost easier to just abstain for six months than to worry for several days about whether I made the right call -- except that it wouldn't really be easier. I never thought I was all that good at math, but the extensive calculus I go through to assess the daily status is worthy of a doctoral dissertation.

But yes for what?

Keyboard alert: Betty is much funnier about early fertility than I could ever be.

Hallelujah

About a week and a half ago, I was asked to help sing at a wedding. It was a Catholic wedding, but not a Mass, and there wasn't even much music. However, the bride had requested an Alleluia, and not just any Alleluia, but, for reasons that were personally and culturally significant, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, like so:



I only know one verse of Hallelujuah, the one that goes:

I heard a stern and secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really go for music, do ya?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
The minor chord, the major shift,
da da da da da da da, Hallelujah!

But it didn't matter what words I knew, because not only did the bride want to sing the verses herself, but they weren't the original words, and they weren't in English.

Friends, I have given up trying to be a liturgical crusader, a cause that used to be very important to me. I won't justify musical innovation on grounds of liturgy; it's clearly an abuse. But right now my role seems to be not advocacy, but obedience to anything not morally suspect, and I've stopped putting my energies into trying to introduce Gregorian chant, and into simply singing what I'm given as excellently as possible. As it was, this request was okayed by the presider and relayed to me by the bemused pianist, and we figured out how to make it work with as much dignity and as little embarrassment as possible to the bride, an amateur in all senses of the word.

Also a week and a half ago, I sat on my bed staring at my NFP chart, trying to figure out why my period seemed to be late.

When the first niggling feeling that things were not on time began, various dramatic possibilities flitted through my mind. Perhaps I'd just take a day away to absorb this huge new development, and just come home whenever I felt like it. Let Darwin figure out what was going on himself. Maybe I'd just sit in my room and cry. Maybe I'd bear it bravely for several days until I was certain, but how would I break the news to Darwin?

And then I actually looked at my chart, which I usually update at night, in the dim lamplight, while trying to nurse baby to sleep, and realized that my life hack of updating my chart on the back of an old chart because I hadn't gotten around to ordering new ones had failed me when I'd somehow skipped from day 17 to day 19. I wasn't quite late, yet. I simply wasn't on the day I thought I was, which had repercussions for me in a month in which I'd had a cold and had used mucus-thickening cough syrup. And there was no one to blame but myself.

"You goddamn idiot," I said to myself. "You GODDAMN idiot."

Which was a lie, actually, as the one thing I hadn't done in the scenario was sin.

That afternoon when Darwin came home and kissed me as I stood over the stove stirring a pot while a child hung on my leg, and asked, "How's it going today?", I didn't make a dramatic fuss or bear up bravely by myself. I said, "Actually, let's step out on the porch," and we shut the door on the protesting child as I explained.

"Trust the biology," he said. "You recorded the signs, right? What does it matter what day it is if the signs were correct?"

"I know," I said, "but if I was off a day, maybe I was seeing what I thought I should be seeing? I was sure at the time, but now... I even thought we were waiting a extra day, but my count was off, and the cough syrup..."

We pondered, quietly. Recall that when we talk about NFP, or the difficulties thereof, we're only ever talking about sex. What would it have mattered what the signs were, if we didn't act on them? Why didn't we always build in an extra day? Why put ourselves through this stress? But did we even need to stress if we'd followed the signs correctly?

A day passed. Two days passed. I spent my nights awake, mostly in prayer. Help me get through this, Lord. Please, please, guard my blood pressure. Help me deal with giving birth at age 40, with veins and stupid support hose I thought I'd never have to wear again. Help me deal with the school year, and my Confirmation class, in the midst of nausea and fatigue. Help me run my household and not neglect my children and husband. Help Darwin. Help me deal with the scorn, the snickering, as I have children number 7 and 8 in less than two years. Help me weather the contempt even of my fellow Catholics who will take my failure as one more feather in their anti-Humanae Vitae cap, who demand more honesty and proof that NFP isn't all happy clap-trap and then seize on any honesty as evidence that the teaching itself is wrong.

And so I began to make changes. I took my vitamin and stopped taking sugar in my tea. Darwin and I walked a mile each day. I started trying to cut out one of the baby's feedings at night. And still I waited: day 29, day 30.

On Saturday morning, day 31 of the cycle, Darwin and I walked downtown, and we talked about facing the reality of an unexpected, geriatric pregnancy. How would the household need to be structured during these months? What should I cut out from my schedule, if anything? How could he get home early each night? How could we help each other through this? We were anxious, scared even, but we looked to the future and even bandied about some baby names.

That afternoon, right before I walked out the door to go to the wedding, I started bleeding: not the spotty bleeding of implantation or the old, tissue-heavy blood of miscarriage (both of which I know), but the true, brilliant, lifeblood of a period. Darwin had been right: trust the biology. And God be praised for his mercy, and for letting the mother of seven children languish.

At the wedding, I sang the refrain of Hallelujah for the congregation, trying to walk an appropriate line between style and occasion. The glowing bride belted out the verses to her grinning bridegroom as the pianist slowed down as much as he could and looked to me to bring him in on the refrain. The presider waited patiently, having worked with the couple for a year to bring the wedding to fruition. He knew, as I should have known, that concessions are made for the weak, not the strong, and that the sacrament is the sacrament whether or not the music meets my taste.

Back in the choir loft, I listened to the questions before the vows:

Have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?                   
Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?                   
Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?

Yes, I thought. Yes, we entered into marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly, and we work hard, daily, to keep our marriage uncoerced, free, and wholehearted. Yes, we were prepared to love and honor each other, even in a time of stress. Yes, we were prepared to accept children lovingly from God, even when his timing was not ours. We had been ready to accept! We had been put to the test, and we had not blamed each other or turned cold or lashed out, but had prepared to receive good from the hand of the Lord. We  had turned to each other for support and comfort, not knowing what the future would hold, only knowing that whatever happened, we would face it together.

We took another walk in the evening, to a local wine bar. We discussed concrete changes we would make, now that we'd been given a reprieve. No more haphazard charting on the back of paper charts, with only one set of tired eyes looking at the data -- time to download a charting app to reduce as much as possible the human error of recording the wrong day. We discussed whether we should spring for a fertility monitor, but decided against it at this moment, as, in the end, the biology had been correct. We talked about how it would look to enter a maintenance mode to avoid a possibly complicated and hazardous pregnancy as I get older. We cast our discussion forward for the first time to that next hurdle, menopause. "I never thought I'd say this," I said, "but I wish I were 55. How cool would that be?"

At other times in our marriage, we've been called upon to accept an unexpected pregnancy. Our table is populated with unexpected olive shoots -- not all surprise pregnancies, but children whose personalities and gifts exceed anything we could have expected based on their parents' limitations. But this time, this time the cup passed from us, and for that I sing a blessed and broken Hallelujah.