Trent Horn discusses with a caller why Catholic couples might use natural family planning instead of simply assuming that God will provide for as many children as He sends.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Mike in Columbus, Ohio. Mike, you are on with Trent Horn.
Caller: Hi, thanks for taking my call. Thank you. So I have—my friends have kind of been pushing natural family planning on me, and I’ve looked into it quite a bit, and I guess I’m just a little bit confused, because I the whole, like, planning aspect doesn’t sit well with me. And I just, I don’t know how to approach it, I guess. I mean, I kind of thought when I got married that getting married meant having children. So I don’t know why I would want to plan my family.
Trent: Well, that’s an interesting question, Mike. Yes, when we marry as Catholics we promise to be open to life, and that the fulfillment of marriage is found in having children. But God also gave us rational minds, He helped us understand what is prudent, what’s a good decision that we should make, and one of the things He gave us is the ability to understand when a couple is fertile or not fertile, and how to choose when to engage in sexual relations to plan, for example, the number of children to have, or when someone would have a child. Would you agree that a couple may want to have children but might decide they could only care for a certain number or at a certain time?
Caller: Well yeah, but would you agree that God will provide? I mean, like, we live in the richest country in the world.
Trent: Well just because we live in a prosperous country doesn’t mean people have each—every couple is prosperous. There’s many people in the United States that are trying very hard to get by on very meager means. But what if God were to say, you know, I had–imagine I decided to have and I purposely chose to have this many, and I go to Heaven and I say, “God,” you know, “God will provide.” God says, “Yeah I provided you with the means to have THIS number of children!”
It just seems to me that…yeah, Mike, wouldn’t it be, for example, we have to practice prudence. Like for example, if a couple spends, you know, 80 percent of their income on something like like rent, for example, they don’t leave enough over for food and they simply say, “Well, God will provide,” isn’t that just a shorthand excuse for them to act irresponsibly in that avenue?
Caller: Yeah, but I don’t know anyone with 15 children…
Trent: I know people with 12… who can provide! So I’m just saying, Mike, we should be responsible when it comes to caring for our children, would you agree?
Caller: I should. But I don’t think we should use that as an excuse to be…to reject God’s will for our family.
Trent: Well, how does a person know…what do you mean by God’s will for someone’s family? What do you mean by that?
Caller: Well I mean, “Be fruitful and multiply,” doesn’t the Church teach that that’s one of the purposes of marriage, is to have children?
Trent: Sure, but wouldn’t someone fulfill that purpose even if they have one child?
Caller: Well, yeah they would, but I mean…that doesn’t…
Trent: Mike, let’s look at it this way. Would they fulfill the purpose if they received the children from God they felt like they could care for? Wouldn’t they be fulfilling God’s purpose if they say, “Well, we raised the number of children we reasonably felt that we could.” Like, for example, would you agree that if a family feels like they’re stretched thin with four children—they’ve got no money left over at the end of each month, it’s pretty tight—it would be irresponsible for them to go out and adopt a fifth child.
Caller: It would, but that’s relative. I mean, “stretched pretty thin” is relative.
Trent: But would you say, though, there are—are there circumstances where a family feels like—
Caller: Yes.
Trent: Okay, so it seems to me that all we would disagree is, you know…yeah, I want to follow you through with this where we’re going. And I’m glad that you understand—many people don’t—that part of marriage is having children. That’s awesome that you get that, ’cause a lot of people just can’t see that obvious reality of marriage.
But it seems to me, I’m trying to see where your disagreement lies, that there’s–that we have to keep having children in order to in order to fulfill God’s will. I would say a couple should responsibly receive the children they can care for. Does that make sense to you?
Caller: It does…and I mean, we’re kinda on the same page. I just–it seems, in my particular parish, there’s kind of like an over-emphasis on natural family planning. So I don’t want, you know, I couldn’t handle 15 children, but four or six doesn’t seem unreasonable, and it seems like 80% of the time I hear about natural family planning, and 20% of the time I hear about, you know, the blessings of larger families.
Trent: Sure. And I think, Mike, the reason you might hear that a lot more, like “natural family planning, natural family planning,” is so that people… to give them an alternative to the culture’s easy sell of contraception. That it’s just a–do you see where I’m saying that?
Caller: Yeah, yeah.
Trent: I mean, the culture is just throwing at them, “This key to solving your problems, if you feel stressed out, worried about family, number of children, the key to your problems, my friend, is to go down to the pharmacy, go to your doctor, get a prescription, pick up this, and your problems go away.” I mean, that is a seductive, false promise in our culture, so the Church is gonna—and I agree, and I actually agree with you, Mike, in the sense that when I talk to people about natural family planning a lot of people say, “Oh, it’s great way to plan your family, great way to, you know, make sure you don’t have too many children that you can’t care for,” and I’ll remind them, well natural family planning, yes, it helps you plan so that maybe if you don’t feel as if you can have a child, but one of the other great things is, if you’re struggling with infertility, natural family planning is a very efficient way to track fertility so you can have a child. I’ve known many people who were diagnosed with infertility but went to a natural family planning physician and were actually helped to have a child through this method.
So I agree with you, there can be an imbalance in how it’s presented, but I think part of that imbalance arises because the Church is trying to fight a culture that heavily, heavily promotes contraception, you see what I mean?
Caller: Yeah, I see. I see.
Trent: Okay, great, well yeah, definitely give that some more thought, and I’d recommend our friend Jason Evert has a great website, ChastityProject.com has resources on contraception, I think One More Soul is another organization that—Cy, is that correct?—they have some good resources on that.
Host: They do indeed, yeah. Very good.
Trent: `Well thank you so much, Mike, for for calling, hopefully we’ll we’ll catch you another time.