Notes and Thoughts on NFP and Sex
NFP — natural family planning — is…well, no, it’s not actually everywhere these days, though it gets talked about often enough in Catholic circles that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was everywhere. Or in wide use, at any rate. To the best of my knowledge, it isn’t (amongst the general population), although one NFP method was, apparently, approved in Germany for…inclusion in the health department’s list of birth control methods. Or something like that.
That’s how you know you’ve got it made, eh? Get approved by the German government and you’re set for life, a major player on the world stage (which is why you can find schnitzel in every convenience store and McDonald’s “restaurant” between here and…what’s that? You can’t?
Well…crumb.
Lest the reader think I’m attempting to denigrate NFP, let me point out at this time that my wife and I practice NFP (specifically: the Billings Ovulation Method, one of the more unobtrusive techniques). But rather like H. W. Crocker at Inside Catholic remarks in his most recent article, our experience of NFP has been that it…
…well, hold up now.
For a moment there, I was going to say that, pace Crocker, NFP doesn’t work in our experience. But there’s call for caution in saying as much, because to put it in those terms implies that the desired “end” of using NFP is the prevention of pregnancy. And to be fair, for many couples, that’s what it is used for. In many cases, that is also the framing context for how the various NFP techniques are taught.
Here’s a radical thought: if that’s why you use NFP, then as the lolcats say, yor doin it rong.
When we look at the morality of…anything, really…we do not just look at the act alone. Granted, we do look at the act, and granted, some acts are intrinsically evil on their own, regardless of the intent behind them (abortion, for instance). But we still look at the intent, and for good reason: Jesus tells us to, because intent is often the immorality hidden behind an outwardly moral, or morally neutral, facade. If we look longingly (read: covetously) at our neighbour’s wife or big screen TV, but do not pursue an affair or an opportunity to commit theft, then at least in terms of our actions we have done nothing immoral. But we have still sinned, even so.
So let’s come back to the matter of NFP and how we use it. There is nothing immoral, more or less (let’s set aside the tangential discussion of licit vs. lustful marital relations), in the “act” of “using” NFP, provided one is doing so with only the person to whom one is validly married. (I can’t imagine NFP enjoys wild popularity with the “out of wedlock” set, anyhow, and even if it did it would rate nothing more than a “that’s nice, but…”)
But what about intent? Sure, it’s all well and good that you are absolutely staving off pregnancy using a method that the Church has no moral objection to on paper. But if your principal intent is to indefinitely postpone pregnancy, what really separates your practice of NFP from the couple down the road’s practice of having the guy don a wee piece of latex? The notion of “openness” to conception, even though you only ever have Sex in that post-ovulation timeframe when conception is a tiny possibility? NFP is touted as having a 97%+ “success rate” (where “success” is defined, apparently, as avoiding pregnancy) — by comparison, doesn’t the mere 80%+ “success rate” of condoms seem almost to make latex the birth control method that is more open to the possibility of conception?
Yes, I’m being facetious, but then only in service of a larger point: if your ultimate intent in using one of several ostensibly effective NFP methods is essentially indistinguishable from the intent of a couple that uses condoms as their method of birth control, are you really conforming your sexual life to Church teaching? Especially if the only real distinction is just some airy talk about “openness” that in reality is quite far removed from that very ideal?
Crocker points out, basically, that intent must harmonize with action. If you want your sex to be unitive and genuinely open to procreativity, then act like it! And intend it! Use NFP not to avoid having children, but to have children!
That’s not to say that there are not some compelling reasons to temporarily postpone the next pregnancy — health reasons being the most obvious. That’s also not to say that children are something one should just blunder into unprepared; Ella is a handful and a half, and I’d be a liar of the worst sort if I said that there weren’t some days in which I swear I’d have to be insane to want “another one.” Parenting is hard on a good day…and I don’t care to talk about the bad days.
And yet: I’m married. Moreover, I’m a Catholic and married. More than that, I’m a Catholic married to a Catholic. Procreativity isn’t…heck…children aren’t an option. Nor are they a right, something to which Grace and I are entitled. They’re an obligation, a sacred duty. Admittedly, various factors have aligned in such a way as to make this duty one which we will likely not have difficulty executing time and again, as often as it is we are called to do so. Even so: we are obligated.
But it’s easy to lose sight of that obligation, isn’t it? It’s a subtle thing, but concupiscence intrudes into this understanding of duty. We throw about terms and conditions — “we’re not ready,” “we only want two,” “we’re focusing on our careers right now,” “we’re just focusing on each other right now and want to bond more as a couple,” — as though we believe it is our right to dictate these things, to draw these lines in the sand.
And yet…it isn’t. Those are all things that, in a properly ordered sex life, are not dictated to God, but are instead subordinated to His Will. It’s His to decide the number of our progeny, and His to say “yes, darn it, you ARE ready.” (or to say “yes, IT’S EXACTLY THE POINT that you’re not ready!”)
We’re just along for the ride, really. NFP can help us stay on track, but we should perhaps think twice about using it primarily for its supposedly high rate of success at pregnancy prevention.
I often look at how many embrace Theology of the Body (e.g. Christopher West, various engaged or recently wedded Catholic couples in my age range), and how others reject it in no small part because they are repulsed by those who embrace it (e.g. Kathy Shaidle, Hillary White)…and I cannot help but draw a parallel with that other great piece of “love it or hate it, and nothing in between,” (relatively) recent Church writing (or doctrine, in this case): Vatican II.
I mean, think on it for a bit. If you look at the majority of people who look askance at Vatican II, they do so in no small part as a response to how others have embraced it — or, more correctly, aspects of it — and turned it to less-than-entirely-legitimate ends. The oft-lambasted “Spirit of Vatican II” has been used to justify all manner of progressive intrusions into the Church, which rightly repulse orthodox Catholics…who then make the mistake, I think, of tossing the baby out with the bathwater by more or less entirely rejecting (or, if not rejecting, downplaying in the extreme) Vatican II as a whole.
I think this does a grave injustice to Vatican II, myself, because in my experience Vatican II says a lot more than its progressive adorers think it does (or, perhaps, says a lot less). How many post-Vatican II Roman Catholics accept and believe (to take one small example) that it is still a mortal sin to miss Mass? It is…but many pew-sitters tend to think that Vatican II jettisoned that particular bit of Catholic obligation.
I think Theology of the Body has, in many respects, been treated in a very similar way, because I think at its core Theology of the Body affirms the innate beauty and, yes, plainly evident fun of sex. Granted, it does so in a way that also speaks to the deeper theological significance of sex (e.g. procreativity/unitivity, imaging of the Trinity) and necessarily must do so. In the end, though, my reading of Theology of the Body has never been one that tends toward dour Victorianism. But I suspect that many of Theology of the Body’s public supporters and advocates tend to push the “fun stuff” to the side a bit because they fear — and then not entirely wrongly — the effect of human concupiscence; they fear that the audience will zero in on the “fun stuff” to the detriment (or exclusion) of the deeper theological realities behind same, which is no less an error than being too dour about sex in presenting Theology of the Body.
I think what underpins all of this is fear, personally. NFP is used because we fear to contravene Church teaching. NFP is used for its “family planning” (in the euphemistic sense) component because we likewise fear to become pregnant for various reasons which, in the final analysis, will in fact seem trivial…but which seem all but all-consuming in the here and now. Theology of the Body is presented to us, in the meantime, by people who fear that we are entirely subservient to our lusts; they fear that we will latch on to the “fun” part and give the meanings, symbolisms, and deeper realities of sex a pass as we race back to our bedrooms.
Yet the truth is somewhere in between, isn’t it? Theology of the Body may not be at the level of Vatican II (that is: it is not binding doctrine), but it is still the reasoned, scholarly work of the Vicar of Christ; we do well to take it seriously. And in truth, Theology of the Body affirms the plain truth that most couples know innately: sex is darn good fun…and is also much, much more (although it is impossible to appreciate HOW much more until and unless one experiences sex in the context of a marriage in which husband and wife are mutually self-giving, and in which the couple have been duly blessed with a child some 40 weeks (or thereabouts) following a particular amourous adventure. In that, sex images the love of Christ for His Church (c.f. Ephesians 5), and also images the very nature of the Trinity by means of erotic metaphor and symbolism.
But it’s still darn good fun. That is, I think, Theology of the Body in a nutshell. Pity nobody seems to teach it that way.
Even good Catholics get caught up, as I previously mentioned, in the trap of a particular form of thinking which is, at its core, secular in nature (not to mention concupiscent). Even if they can accept, on paper, that sex is about both unitivity and procreativity, they still speak in those dismal terms of “expected” and “unexpected”/”planned” and “unplanned” pregnancies. And their use of NFP is strongly geared toward ensuring that their pregnancies are always planned, always intended.
I’ve said one bit, above, about my thoughts about using NFP for those ends. But to what I said, I suppose I could add a more direct response (a retort, really): “why not just always intend to have a baby? Why not just always WANT to have a baby?”
This time, I’m not being facetious. But to establish where I’m coming from here, let me yield the floor to John Zmirak, who writes:
Somehow, I can’t believe that this is the answer to a question I often ask myself: What Would Unfallen Adam Do (WWUAD)? That’s a worthy inquiry, since it helps us distinguish between the demands of natural justice (WWUAD) and the higher call of Grace. We need a higher call, since our darkened reason is all too ready to tell us what our fallen will would like to hear – that the guy who’s making me late for work really does deserve to spend the rest of his life in one of those nifty paraplegic scooters. And it’s my job to put him there, to stop him before he blocks traffic again.
Fast forward to a few weeks later, and to a different Zmirak piece, to find his answer to the “WWUAD?” question in regard to sex, pregnancy, and the notion of “wantedness”:
Freedom from concupiscence. Our desires would never have exceeded what was appropriate for our needs, or goaded us into sin. No one would take “all you can eat” as a personal challenge, hog both lanes of a two-way country road, look longingly at someone else’s spouse, or gasp at the results of a pregnancy test. Each child would be a wanted child.
Note how he takes a common pro-choice trope and inverts it’s meaning? When progressives speak of every child being “wanted,” they do so as a means of justifying expanding the availability of abortion services so as to better enable people to apply some retroactive birth control. Zmirak inverts this to assert, instead, that in an unfallen world, nobody would hop in the sack for a romp who was not entirely at ease with the notion of becoming pregnant and raising a child.
But note too that in an unfallen world, nobody would end up in that absurd position that so often results for couples that use NFP: months and months (and months) in which sex is just not on the radar.
There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a guy who is trying to reason his way into his wife’s pants, but the introduction of sex to a relationship is very much a one-way thing: once it’s part of the marital reality, it cannot safely cease to be a part of that reality. And if there’s ever going to be a proof of the unitive nature of sex, surely it is a “proof by contradiction”: look at any young couple that has not had sex for months on end. Do they seem to be in unity to a high degree? Do they display a complimentarity that is a suitable image of the Trinity? Or are they…just maybe…a wee bit testy with each other? A wee bit…unnaturally frustrated?
In an unfallen world, that bitter reality –which is itself also an effect of concupiscence — would not exist; every couple would have sex at least as often as was realistically necessary to maintain the entirety of their marital unity by maintaining that particular form of two becoming as one. And if a baby resulted therefrom…more’s the better!
THAT, I think, is the ideal not only behind Theology of the Body, but also behind the Church’s endorsement of NFP. And it’s what Crocker was getting at, as well: babies ARE the plan, not WHAT we plan.
Crocker’s rallying cry (“Use NFP: It Doesn’t Work!”) is very much my own lament and exultation.
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