This is the beginning of National Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, shining a spotlight on that morally licit method of spacing births based on the observation and interpretation of signs of fertility in a woman’s body. For decades, Catholic ministries have promoted NFP to married couples to help them control when and whether they have children, and as an aid to marital communication and holistic women’s health.
What about engaged couples? In the wake of recent news items, there has been lively discussion over whether NFP education is appropriate before marriage. In this edition of Both Sides Now, we offer two takes on this question. Should the Church’s marriage-prep programs include mandatory instruction on natural family planning? Yes or no?
YES: It Can Draw Them Deeper Into Catholic Truth
Catholic marriage preparation seems an unlikely topic for debate, but somehow it has become one. Recently, for example, I weighed in on the question of whether the process for engaged couples should be made longer and more demanding, as some (including Pope Francis) had been suggesting.
I came down on the “no” side of that question. But on this question of whether natural family planning (NFP) education should be a required part of Catholic marriage prep, I say “yes.” A full NFP course is too time-demanding and probably too intimate to mandate for engaged couples, but Catholic pre-marriage formation ought to include a substantive introduction to NFP and an accompanying defense of its moral context within Catholic teaching on contraception.
Some years ago, I was employed at a diocesan family life office, and a great part of my duties involved running marriage-prep programming designed to educate couples in Catholic sexual morality. From that experience, as well as my time at Catholic Answers as an observer of (and sometimes participant in) apologetics in that area, I offer three reasons in defense of this position.
- Christian marriage is countercultural, and NFP education gets people thinking counterculturally.
Marriage is a natural institution that predates Christianity, but to the modern world, Christian marriage is a strange curiosity—like the Amish, or cars with stick shifts. That makes it, from our perspective, it’s an instrument of rebellion. So engaged couples should be trained as revolutionaries.
That means putting them in a mindset of being distinct from the world. Where the world pursues relationships based on sexual gratification and personal fulfilment, we offer the self-emptying model of Christ and the Church his bride. Where the world says we can redefine marriage or dissolve it at will, we say, “One man, one woman, for life.”
And when the world sterilizes sex, using pills and barriers to subordinate fecundity to pleasure, we insist on the inseparable connection between marriage and children. Underscoring this connection, education in natural family planning breeds revolutionary thinking—arguably even more than the “providentialist” approach that would have us simply tell couples not to use contraception and leave it at that.
It does this, I suggest, by introducing another countercultural concept: marital continence. For good motives, the Church says, we may use our rational powers to delay or space births by identifying fertile periods and—in an act stupefying to the spirit of our sexually saturated age—during those periods foregoing the use of our sexual faculties. In this light, NFP education can be part of a larger training in the self-sacrificial Christian ethos without which we can neither be distinct from the world nor convert it.
- NFP education forces hard thought and choices that clarify engaged couples’ motives.
In the Midwestern diocese where I helped prepare thousands of couples for marriage, mixed-faith couples were common. Of these, the woman overwhelmingly made up the Catholic half of the duo, and I can still picture the faces of the non-Catholic men who were forced to endure the trial: glazed over, checked out, sometimes scowling. Each time, I told myself that if we couldn’t immediately convict them (along with the many lukewarm cradle Catholics) of the full suite of Catholic teaching about marriage and sex, we could at least confront them. We could dispel their ignorance and place before them a set of moral choices that their decision to marry in the Church made inescapable.
Education in NFP is a concrete tool for delivering that challenge. And so many need to hear it:
- Those unbelieving husbands to be;
- Women raised Catholic but who have resigned themselves to life under the regime of the Pill;
- Men who are vaguely aware that they’re getting ready to vow that they will accept children lovingly but harbor deep contraceptive assumptions;
- All modern people, accustomed to consequentialist reasoning, who have never been taught to make practical moral distinctions and follow them courageously;
- All people whose minds are darkened by the lies of culture of death, which aims to keep fertility and prenatal human development shrouded in mystery.
For all these folks and others, NFP education helps lead to a fork in the road. It exhorts them to love and respect God’s gift of fertility in marriage and encourages intentional thinking about how they will honor it. As a concretization of Catholic sexual principles, it advances their moral maturity and hence their suitability for marriage. Conversely but no less importantly, it can help drive couples to the realization that they lack the moral maturity, or the shared vision of authentic Christian marriage, that they ought to have, and put off their wedding. I have seen both of these things happen.
- NFP education opens skeptics’ minds to consider the truth of broader principles of Catholic teaching.
After reading that last section, perhaps you’re asking why “concretization” is even necessary. Why not just teach that marriage is for babies and contraception is intrinsically immoral? In fact, isn’t it off-message to teach that procreation is the principal end of marriage but then show people how to avoid procreation?
I think it’s straightforward enough to dismiss that latter question with the reminder that Catholic teaching does not require married couples to expressly intend conception with every single marital act, or to dutifully perform the act at every possible opportunity. There is no baby quota in canon law. If it were otherwise, periodic abstinence would be as immoral as a condom.
It is not NFP that poses this seeming-but-not-really contradiction between conception-avoiding and child-bearing, but rather Catholic teaching, which affirms that couples with “serious” motives may combine periodic abstinence with observation of fertility signs in order to delay or space out births—even for an “indefinite” period (Humanae Vitae 10).
As a practical point—and I saw this many times when I worked in this field—presenting to engaged couples the Church’s affirmation of a licit way to plan families, combined with compelling proofs of that way’s real effectiveness (the rejoinder to a thousand moldy “rhythm method” jokes), has the effect of shining a new light of legitimacy on the Church’s hard (to the masses of baptized pagans) sexual teachings.
For many modern people, including many people who present themselves for Catholic marriage, a church that says, “No birth control! You will have more kids than you can handle and you will like it!” (or at least, it comes across to their ears like this) is fit only for scorn. They will conclude that they can safely ignore the hopelessly outdated teachings of such a church as soon as they exit the vestibule on their wedding day.
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be this way. In a perfect world, Catholic couples would approach marriage with generous and obedient hearts, untainted by secular influence. Their bodies, minds, and souls would be perfectly integrated and their consciences flawlessly formed by Catholic teaching.
I have known a few couples who came pretty close to those standards! But the great majority do not. And they need ministering-to also.
When such people are led to understand that Catholic marital/sexual teaching is not unworkably onerous or a mere “ideal” that no one but the heroically faithful can actually follow, but is in fact coherent, beautiful, and ordered to personal happiness, they start down an important path of interior conversion. Natural family planning education supports this conversion by offering a practical validation of that teaching.
The Church does not owe anyone this validation. Truth is truth. But it’s a wise strategy to offer it. In our time, the Magisterium has endorsed family planning through periodic continence. In our time, God has directed mankind’s intellect to deeper understanding of the exquisite mechanism of procreation. Together these things present to skeptics a “reasonableness offensive” that helps make our weird countercultural teachings seem . . . well, perhaps still weird, but doable.
That initial overcoming of inertia could be the beginning of a long ascent of virtue, leading to stronger, more faithful and fruitful families, and thus, to the reclaiming of culture, one marriage at a time.
NO: Prepare Them for Marriage Instead
By Drew Belsky
Here it comes. Tory and I nudge each other. The NFP presentation.
The trim, smartly dressed forties-ish wife begins by apologizing for her husband’s absence. This being the “Intimacy” unit of the engaged couples’ retreat, he was supposed to do half, but he is at a golf game. Undaunted, she rhapsodizes to us couples about Natural Family Planning—chiefly how her husband times all their romantic getaways perfectly, to guarantee they’ll have no children.
“Responsible parenthood,” she promises in closing, is “just as effective as birth control!”
Some NFP enthusiasts react to this story with disbelief. It’s possible that “not all NFP is like that,” to bastardize an old meme. But after having heard enough similar stories from disaffected young Catholics, I maintain (Tory does, too) that NFP shouldn’t be taught in marriage prep, even when unimpeded by tee time.
What Even Is NFP?
The U.S. bishops’ conference spells it out: “an umbrella term for certain methods used to achieve and avoid pregnancies.” These descriptors shed light on the issue at hand. Let’s go in reverse order.
Avoid Pregnancies
In Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI describes marriage—“chaste wedlock”—as “the principle and foundation of domestic society and therefore of all human intercourse” and “a truly and great sacrament.” Among the blessings of marriage, “the child holds the first place.” Pius goes on to quote St. Augustine, who, analyzing St. Paul (i.e., 1 Tim. 5:14), affirms that “marriage is for the sake of generation.”
This brief game of “Church history telephone” suffices to establish that marriage’s primary purpose is children. Immediately, the appropriateness of teaching all engaged couples techniques to “avoid pregnancies”—that is, to ensure that sex won’t result in a baby—seems to be on shaky ground.
Marketing for “trying to avoid” tends to focus on more reasonable concerns: having a baby will maim or kill you, for example, or mire you in abject poverty, and NFP can prevent those catastrophes by preventing the baby. (“Virtually cost-free!” say the U.S. bishops, twice.) “Grave” or “serious” afflictions like these do exist, and what a husband and wife prayerfully discern in this regard is not for anyone but a spiritual adviser even to wonder about.
But is this the stuff of marriage prep? To teach couples on the verge of “the foundation of society” how not to have children?
I say no. “Grave” and “serious” reasons are not the same as modernity’s insane insistence on “having it all together” before marriage. Poor people can marry as well as rich, and young as well as old. Nor does tying the knot require perfect health. Children will bless, not burden marriages on almost the whole socioeconomic spectrum.
The extremely exceptional cases, where bearing a child will literally bankrupt or cripple or kill, deserve exceptional marriage formation. The remaining majority are better served with encouragement to hope for children and knowledge of how to welcome them.
Achieve Pregnancies
This brings us to the other, opposite thing NFP is used for. Perhaps counterintuitively, the “against” reasoning is the same.
Preparation for the sacrament of vocation to which God calls the overwhelming majority must be designed for the overwhelming majority. These will conceive children—maybe not as readily as they want or expect, but God designed couples to be fertile. Most couples are.
This is not to dismiss the exceptional cases, but rather, again, to insist that they deserve exceptional treatment. An education in NFP to achieve pregnancy will be available for couples with fertility issues if and when they need it.
“Certain Methods”
Take your temperature every day before you get out of bed. Chart, chart, chart. Talk. Discuss. Deliberate. “We use a mucus-based method, but I don’t really like the word ‘mucus,’ so . . . ”
There’s no denying that NFP’s techniques can be useful, but I do deny that they’re appropriate subject matter for marriage prep. Many women understand their cycle, and can explain it to their husbands, without consulting a thermometer. They may consider relentless intimate self-monitoring unnecessary, invasive, and discomfiting to discuss in public.
Married couples who want or need NFP will have resources available. But when a priest demands the submission of fertility charts as a prerequisite for marriage (true story!), we’ve gone off the deep end. Most engaged couples don’t need these regimented medical techniques imposed on them. For most, the babies will come—no techniques or technology required.
What, Then?
If NFP is “understanding the menstrual cycle,” I call that Sex Ed 101, which healthy Catholic couples can figure out on their own. If NFP is a scientific approach to restoring fertility, that’s an undeniable good, but best suited to the NaPro doctor’s office. And if it’s nothing more than natural contraception (the implied counterpart to “artificial contraception”), then I repurpose Flannery O’Connor’s take on a symbolic Eucharist.
Crowding out NFP in the marriage prep curriculum is an overabundance of “sex stuff” that will directly and immediately benefit every attending couple.
- Tackle the wisdom and the difficulty of Ephesians 5:22-33 and 1 Peter 2:18-25, 3:1-7.
- Study the harmony between the generosity prescribed in 1 Corinthians 7:4 and the dedicated continence advised in the next verse.
- Expose the joyless hellscape of secular dating and sex, and hammer home why what the Church offers is so much better.
- Prepare to defend union and spouse from the world’s depredations.
- Go for broke and learn the secrets to healthy pregnancy and childbirth that you’ll never hear from the public school or the gynecologist.
What room is left for NFP? No more than this: “Should you have trouble down the road, this might help you. The Church permits it. There’s a list of resources in the vestibule.” And then back to Arcanum Divinae, Casti Connubii, Familiaris Consortio (throw in What Is Marriage? and Anna Karenina), and how to navigate the thrilling and challenging lifelong adventure to come.