Potential Dangers of an NFP Mentality

Disclaimer:  Do review my commenting policy before blasting an insult or intentionally provoking controversial remark.  Also, please keep in mind that my ideal audience is a particularly Catholic one with a fundamental understanding of the teaching of the Catholic Church on fertility, such as is written about in Blessed John Paul II's Theology of the Body.  Feel free to pose questions if you are unfamiliar with our beliefs or don't understand.  However, if one wishes to make an off-topic remark or pick a fight about something only vaguely related, e.g. "Catholic priests are pedophiles omg hatesss," he or she will be promptly ignored.



I've not had the privilege of growing up in an active, loyal, practicing Catholic community.  Only recently has it been called to my attention that eager Catholics who practice NFP too often take sides and nitpick over which family planning method is the best, most accurate, easiest lifestyle, etc.  Conversation to improve and propagate NFP methods is good and desirable.  But I'm worried sometimes about the direction our thought patterns are headed when I glean bits of these conversations.


Herbert James Draper, A Water Baby
First and foremost, before even picking up an NFP pamphlet, we Catholics should be made to understand and internalize that fertility is a precious privilege and inherently good.  Learning about how it works is wonderful, but only so much as being aware of what and how you eat nourishes your body is wonderful.  It's a tool, not to be mistaken for the goodness of the thing itself.  I feel too often we're bringing the conversation into secular territory, with emphasis on 99% accuracy, arguments about which are less likely to "fail" during fertile periods, and exclamations of better sex lives and closer couples.  Like we're trying to compete with the artificial birth control out there, like we have to prove ourselves.

The fact of the matter is that there is no competition.  If you are a loyal practicing Catholic, you know that to approach NFP with the attitude that it is "an acceptable form of Catholic birth control" defeats the whole purpose of Natural Family Planning.  I hope I'm mistaken, but I'm getting this impression more and more.

How do we remedy this attitude in the Church?  I think it has everything to do with our attitude toward children and child-rearing.  If in secular culture, fertility is undermined as something to control and submit to our will, there is no inherent difference between the single, sexually active woman who has successfully avoided pregnancy and the married woman who has 2.5 perfectly spaced babies.  She may even have six!  And it is all well and good, in secular society, as long as she has the means to provide for them (no need for a father for that), and chose when to conceive each consecutive child--God forbid she do otherwise!  Then she is careless, irresponsible, a burden to society, and an enemy of planet Earth.  As if a child's worth in existence depended on an active decision by its parent(s) and not by the will of God.

A prayerful Catholic couple may have none to twenty children in their lifetime together, but that is not the point.  I feel strongly that the term "planned" and "unplanned" applied to children--human beings, with immortal souls and infinite worth--should be stricken from our Catholic vocabulary.  It puts too much emphasis on control, on what we want, on the identity and worth of a child being in the decision to allow conception, like some kind of defeat.

"I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word.  It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning.  The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.  It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control."--G.K. Chesterton

I think this tension can be eased even more by loosening the strict expectations we have of motherhood.  I'm not advocating for careless parenting here, but we should embrace the variety of parenting styles and parenting types out there--there are as many as there are personalities in the Church, and there as many personalities in the Church, Saint Therese pointed out, as there are colors and types of flowers.  It is the variety that makes the world beautiful.  We may disagree on structure, proper nutrition, appropriate bedtime, how much stimulation is allowable, being ecologically responsible, but please, please--there is no better way to discourage a couple to openness to conceive than to make them feel like they would not be "good enough" parents.  We're all working our way to sainthood, which is very telling.  It means we're not yet saints.  And we shouldn't be made to feel guilty or like failures because of that.  A child needs his mother and father.  No one else's.  If we are prayerful and love truly--the way God loves, meaning putting the good of the beloved before all else--the child will be happy, and safe, and emotionally healthy, regardless of whether or not he gets a bath regularly.

In this way, we should also show patience and sympathy for couples, especially Catholic ones, who don't yet have the courage to give up their fertility to the hands of God.  It will help to remember all the shortcomings and vices we continue to nurse.  Everyone has their personal weaknesses.  Let's pray for each other.

Last, let us remember that NFP is a fairly recent development.  But the Church has always forbidden contraception.  I'm no expert, but interest in and research into medieval lifestyle led me to discover that sex in marriage was under strict prohibitions by the Church in the middle ages.  A couple was not to have sex during holy days, menstruation, Lent, etc.  Far from being shocked and angered at these "prudish" guidelines, I felt smug and warmly proud.  This is the clever Church, doing what she does best: making feasts and fasts a mystical rhythm of life, and seeing to it in her own way that her women had proper rests between pregnancies.

So don't apologize for your fertility.  Don't blush shame-facedly when you find yourself pregnant after having announced to the world that you practice NFP and that it is a perfectly valid and effective method of spacing pregnancies.  Don't.  Because that "pregnancy" is a person, with a face and a life ripe with potential stretched out before her.  When someone asks me, "Was your son planned?" I will say, with surety, "What do you mean? This child blossomed like a wildflower in the mind of God before all of time began."

For further reading, see:




Also, join me in fasting and prayer for Dwija and her little one.  It is during times like these that the universal Church is summoned to battle.

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6 comments:

  1. Yes. This.

    I especially love this part:

    And it is all well and good, in secular society, as long as she has the means to provide for them (no need for a father for that), and chose when to conceive each consecutive child--God forbid she do otherwise! Then she is careless, irresponsible, a burden to society, and an enemy of planet Earth. As if a child's worth in existence depended on an active decision by its parent(s) and not by the will of God.... I feel strongly that the term "planned" and "unplanned" applied to children--human beings, with immortal souls and infinite worth--should be stricken from our Catholic vocabulary.

    As a woman who has desperately wanted to have a child, and has not been able to, I feel that this is true for me as well. It would be wrong to go to petri dishes for a baby, but I think it would also be wrong of me to think in terms of demand and control while using NFP/NaPro/whatever "to achieve". I don't have a right to have a baby. I don't have a right to possess a "human being, with [an] immortal soul and infinite worth".

    Hard to remember, sometimes, like today when I'm attending a shower for an eight months married, eight months pregnant friend. She's Catholic and beautiful and happy and it's only by the grace of God I could be happy with her instead of plain old green. I wanted a honeymoon baby, too. I didn't plan to be five years in and childless. But your final point is beautiful. If I'm ever granted a child, it won't be "planned" or "unplanned". He or she will be someone loved and chosen, both by God and by me.

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    1. We're so preoccupied with rights, aren't we? We have to remember that the only rights we have we have because God gave them to us, not because we deserve them. Far from making me feel put-down, I find this extremely liberating because I never have to worry about being so bad as to lose those rights, and that divine love.

      It's especially frustrating as this new generation of twenties and thirties women are turning back to traditional parenthood and being stay-at-home moms, that THAT has become the "trend," it's almost a danger that we affiliate that with Catholic feminine mystery, though the attitude to approaching the same lifestyle is from a completely different place. Sort of like Masha's reasons for retreating to the woods is completely different from others who live almost the exact same lifestyle!

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    2. I feel like you could be such a great witness to fertile women who are contracepting. That they're willfully frustrating something that you would give so much to have! It makes me angry, so your peace affection and acceptance would be doubly impactful.

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  2. I LOVED this so much!!! And the quote Jenna mentioned above is also my favorite..I've know Catholics who are so obsessed with charting that they don't want to be friends with people who are able to live my dream of babies every year and do so with joy, but they also accost those with "too many years" between babies with a "So..trying to have another yet????????? [the extra question marks signify lots of significant glances]". It's not at all healthy and not at all what the Church intends with the allowance to use NFP..I wanted a honeymoon baby too!..but then, if I'd had one, would I have had Yarrow?? It's one of the problems with interfering in things, you never know what might have been if you'd been more trusting, less controlling..I know NFP is allowed, but sometimes I wonder how much it diminishes God's ability to give in His way and His time, because we're still holding onto control in a sense, still trying to make things work out according to our plans - and sometimes (not always) - while it might be 'permissible' it may also be 'diminishing' in the sense that Abraham taking Hagar was diminishing - not forbidden, but not fully open to God's design..Does that make sense..I think I have a tendency sometimes to over-think and under-act in these things..

    Jenna I wish you hundreds of fat babies! So much so that all writing has to be set aside for exhausted, late-night snatches of time..and your coffee machine is never quiet ;) And your final point is lovely as well - chosen rather than planned - it's a beautiful distinction.

    Christie Your final line is kind of tear-inducing..in a good way. I love to imagine Afon blossoming in the mind of God!

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    1. "I wanted a honeymoon baby too!..but then, if I'd had one, would I have had Yarrow??"

      Exactly! It's this great big might-have-been that looms over everything.

      And yes, I do know what you mean about Hagar and Abraham. Similar to how the Israelites begged for a king, so God succumbed to their pleas and gave them one. Or when Jacob stole Esau's birthright. God is so gracious and blesses even our stubborn mistakes, but we'll never know what kind of glory would have come to pass if we'd be obedient.

      There's a part I love in That Hideous Strength, where Merlin chastens Jane because she was supposed to have brought into the world a child who was foretold and would bring peace and victory over evil . . . but the time had passed for his/her conception, and now that child would never be, because Jane wanted to be "dignified" and equal with her husband and thought she couldn't be those things and obtain her doctorate if she was pregnant and/or had a baby. Merlin's like, "Put her to death!" Yikes!

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    2. P.S. I think we all blossomed in the mind of God before all time began, you know, like the song in The Silmarillion. God saw everything that would be and that might be. He knew Afon would be born, even though I had no idea! Same for every child conceived. And how can someone regret that?

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