Natural Family Planning: The Time Has Come
Both secular humanists and men of Christian faith in 1929-1930 predicted that the acceptance of contraception would bring social evils. Divorce rates are 500% higher now than they were before the birth-control culture wars began just before World War I. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births have soared despite universal access to contraception and abortion. Single motherhood has become the single greatest cause of new poverty households. Sexually transmitted diseases have reached epidemic proportions. In short, the contraceptive sexual revolution has denigrated human sexuality, and the social sciences have documented the personal and social disasters.
The time has come to return to the biblically based faith that sexual intercourse is intended by God to be exclusively a marriage act, and that within marriage it ought to be a renewal of the self-giving love and commitment of the couple’s original marriage covenant. For many, this realization of the meaning of the marriage act has been a life-changing experience.
Natural family planning—whether eco-breastfeeding or systematic NFP—is the answer, spiritually and physically. Safe, healthy, effective, and morally right, it is the best form of conception regulation when it is properly taught and used. Unlike unnatural forms of birth control, NFP has no bad side effects. Best of all, practicing NFP for the right reasons can bring spiritual growth and peace.
The time has come to put aside any sort of wishful thinking that the NFP movement consisting of widely different programs and perspectives can have a significant influence on the Catholic laity, even those who go to church every Sunday. The time has come for the bishops and their priests to recognize that it is an act of love to require their engaged couples to attend the right kind of course on natural family planning. The time has come for bishops and their priests to realize that the evidence is so overwhelming in favor of the health and spacing benefits of ecological breastfeeding that they will desire these benefits for every family in their parishes. The time has come. May every reader of this blog pray that our bishops and priests will love their people so much that they will make the right kind of NFP course a normal part of preparation for Christian marriage—centered on Christ, chaste and generous, life-long and faithful, a true living out of their covenant with God and with each other.
End of daily blogs for NFP Awareness Week
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach