Archive for 2007

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Let Us Not Forget: Grace Builds upon Nature

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

Last week our subject was the most welcome press release by Theresa Notare regarding breastfeeding. This week I will engage in the easy exercise of speculation about what might have been if that sort of promotion of breastfeeding had occurred 55 years ago. The fact that it didn’t happen is evidence of a serious lapse in putting into practice the traditional theological teaching that grace builds upon nature.
      What if in the summer of 1952 the national family life agency of the American bishops had issued an urgent appeal to all bishops and priests to promote breastfeeding?
What if moral theologians of the day had researched the long and rich tradition of Catholic moral theology that stressed the obligation of mothers to breastfeed their own children? What if they had gone back only to October 1941 when Pope Pius XII took time out from his busy wartime activities to urge all mothers to breastfeed their babies if at all possible?
      What if the Pre-Cana Movement that was growing by leaps and bounds at that time had promoted breastfeeding and especially the pattern of frequent nursing that we now call ecological breastfeeding?
      What if the Church in America had enthusiastically welcomed the founding of La Leche League in 1956-1957? What if Msgr. George A. Kelly, truly a great and family-oriented priest, had promoted both ecological breastfeeding and the calendar-temperature rhythm method in his best selling 1958 book, The Catholic Marriage Manual?

If those things had happened and if the Catholic laity had internalized such teaching, I am confident that things would have been quite different in the turbulent Sixties. I was working as a lay evangelist in a parish in Santa Clara CA in the mid-Sixties, and I surely wish that the Catholic tradition of breastfeeding was alive and well in those days. I can still remember all too well the plight of a 30 year-old mother of seven children. This was probably 1965, and she had most likely married right out of college at age 22. In other words, she married in 1957. Her face was still very pretty, but her legs showed the effect of having so many children in such a short time, for varicose veins were obvious to most casual observer. She wasn’t complaining about the number of her children, but her question truly reached me. “I have another 15 years of fertility ahead of me. At this rate we will have 20 children. What are we supposed to do?” She asked me this because I was known to defend the Church’s teaching against unnatural forms of birth control. She knew I wasn’t going along with the new “scientific miracle” called the Pill, but she needed and wanted some help consistent with Catholic teaching. I tried to say something about calendar rhythm, but I was quite ignorant on that subject at the time. It had not been part of the theological program preparing me for parish evangelical work.

But what if she had been reached in a pre-marriage program that really advocated the Catholic and healthy tradition of exclusive and frequent breastfeeding for the first six to eight months and continued frequent nursing for at least two years. What if she had given birth at two-year intervals instead of annually? What if she and her husband had learned the rudiments of calendar-temperature rhythm, about the only thing that was somewhat well-known at the time? What if she knew from experience that Catholic teaching was eminently livable?
      What if her practice of something approaching ecological breastfeeding and their knowledge of calendar-temperature rhythm was multiplied many thousands of times throughout the more than 10,000 parishes in the States at the time?

In my opinion, Father Charles Curran and his sympathizers would not have any sort of mass following just as they have no following among those practicing chaste NFP today. The difference would be that instead of about 3 percent of Catholic families currently practicing modern NFP, the numbers at that time would have been at least 65 percent. Yes, in 1962 or 1963, a survey indicated that some 62 or 63 percent of Catholic parents still accepted and followed Catholic teaching on birth control, and all they had was calendar rhythm or calendar-temperature rhythm, the latter of which could be highly effective if properly understood and practiced.

It had been a long theological teaching in the Catholic Church that grace builds upon nature. Somewhere along the line, our moral theologians accepted the growing practice of bottle-feeding. If asked, these moral theologians and pastors of yesteryear would have agreed that parents have a general obligation to do what is best for their children within their circumstances. But somewhere along the line Catholic doctors, theologians, and pastors forgot that breastfeeding really is best, that it is God’s plan for nutrition and nurturing and that it spaces babies.

The significance of Theresa Notare’s press release on breastfeeding is that it may sound a clarion call within the Catholic Church to restart the longstanding tradition in favor of breastfeeding as God’s own plan for baby care. We can hope also that a reawakened tradition will include the promotion and teaching of ecological breastfeeding as well, God’s own plan for spacing babies.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)

Posted in Ecological Breastfeeding | 3 Comments »

A Breastfeeding and DDP “First”

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

August was a good month for breastfeeding and natural family planning. During NFP Awareness Week (July 22-28), my wife, Sheila, blogged each day on ecological breastfeeding, the only form of breastfeeding associated with extended natural infertility. During World Breastfeeding Week (August 1-7), Sheila blogged daily on the many health benefits of breastfeeding. Then on August 10, Theresa Notare of the USCCB office for Natural Family Planning issued a press release on breastfeeding titled “Mother Nature’s Power Drink.” This release has the potential to do more for increasing the overall rate of breastfeeding in the United States than anything that Sheila and I can ever hope to accomplish.

The release, which is printed in full below, does not represent a policy statement on the part of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. Not yet. Its significance is that it is the first such publicity and advocacy given to breastfeeding by any office of the U.S. bishops. The late Bishop James T. McHugh, former head of the bishops’ Diocesan Develop Plan for Natural Family Planning, was definitely in favor of breastfeeding, and he made the introduction to the address of Pope John Paul II to the papal breastfeeding conference in May 1995. However, we are not aware that he ever made a public statement such as this. If serious breastfeeding advocacy would become an official USCCB policy, it could have widespread beneficial effects for the Church and for all those affected by its health-related activities. Sheila and I are grateful for this initiative by Theresa Notare, and we offer her our public thanks.

Next week I will comment more on this potential and what might have been if the Church at its everyday level had retained during the 1950s its former advocacy of breastfeeding. For the present, enjoy Theresa Notare’s press release below
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Life Issues Forum
Mother Nature’s Power Drink
By Theresa Notare
For Immediate Release – August 10, 2007
      Recently a report on a tragedy in Botswana puzzled its medical community. Record numbers of babies died of common diarrhea, in a country where that had rarely happened. The cause? Over a decade of an aggressive anti-AIDS policy that discouraged breastfeeding among HIV infected mothers. Remarkably, in a follow-up study of the tragedy, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that breastfed babies did not die from the diarrhea outbreak.
      Botswana had been a country where the majority of mothers commonly practiced breastfeeding. Once HIV/AIDS surfaced as a public health problem, however, government officials implemented a policy of discouraging breastfeeding and encouraging formula feeding of infants whose mothers were HIV infected. They thought they were protecting babies, but they put their children at greater risk of suffering other devastating illnesses. Why? As the Washington Post pointed out on July 23, 2007, the chances of an HIV infected mother passing the disease through breast milk is “about 1 percent per month of breastfeeding.” Breastfeeding research shows that the “nutrition and antibodies that breast milk provide are so crucial to young children” that their benefits should be carefully weighed against the risk of HIV transmission.
      Breast milk is Mother Nature’s “power drink.” Research confirms its nutritional and immunological benefits. Breast milk reduces a baby’s risk of contracting over twenty illnesses, including allergies, asthma, bacterial meningitis, diarrhea, ear infections, inflammatory bowel disease, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, type 1 and type 2 diabetes. And a woman who breastfeeds reaps benefits for her body too. As breastfeeding advocate Sheila Kippley reports, “one study found that a mother reduced her own risk of getting type-2 diabetes by 15% for each year of nursing. If she nursed two babies, each for a year, she had a 30% risk reduction for this disease, and whatever reduction she received remained in effect for 15 years after the birth of her last baby!”
      Breastfeeding also builds up the mother-child bond on an emotional and spiritual level. As Pope John Paul II said in a talk to members of the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1995, “this natural way of feeding can create a bond of love and security between mother and child, and enable the child to assert its presence as a person through the interaction with the mother.” So meaningful is the breastfeeding relationship, he added, that “the Psalms use the image of the infant at its mother’s breast as a picture of God’s care for man (cf. Ps 22:9).”
      Despite its overwhelming benefits, breastfeeding continues to be little attempted by new mothers in the United States. This is a problem. With our concern for the welfare of the family, the Church can help. Catholic hospitals are in a particularly good position to advise and educate the new mother before and after she gives birth. Diocesan Natural Family Planning classes can take the time to cover basic breastfeeding information. Finally, friends and family also play a role in the new mother’s decision to breastfeed. Children should be given a solid start in life – a plentiful serving of nature’s power drink is a great beginning!
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Theresa Notare, MA is the Assistant Director of the Diocesan Development Program for Natural Family Planning, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
_______

Next week: “What if” in the 1950s.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, easy-to-read, free, downloadable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org

Posted in Ecological Breastfeeding | Comments Off on A Breastfeeding and DDP “First”

Can a Breastfeeding Mother “Use” Her Baby?

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Is it physically possible for a breastfeeding mother to “use” her baby? Yes. Is it morally right or wrong for a mother to “use” her baby? That depends upon what is meant by “using” another person. There is a good sense and a bad sense to that word. An employer uses other people to accomplish a task. If he pays them fairly, provides a safe working environment, and treats them with the dignity due them as human persons, we say he is using them as members of his extended family in the good sense of the term. On the other hand, if the employer pays the least possible amount, fails to provide a safe working environment and in general uses them not in accord with their dignity as human persons, we say that he is using them in the pejorative or bad sense of that term.
      If a breastfeeding mother is engorged and puts her baby to breast for relief, she is clearly using her baby, but is that wrong? My answer comes later. Again, what if she knows that ecological breastfeeding normally delays the return of fertility for over a year. What if she likes that idea and decides to do ecological breastfeeding for that reason? Is she doing something wrong? Is she “using” her baby in the pejorative sense?
      You may think these are silly or purely speculative questions or even cruel ones since they could lead to scrupulosity among sensitive mothers. But the question of “using” one’s breastfeeding baby has been raised in recent months so it calls for a response.

The Question
Would a mother who chose to breastfeed solely for its baby-spacing effects be “using” her baby in the pejorative sense? The short and simple answer is “Absolutely not,” but something more might be helpful.
      We need to start by recognizing that this is a purely hypothetical question. In real life, it would be impossible, practically speaking, for a woman to have or at least to retain such a narrow reason for breastfeeding. For one thing, breastfeeding has too many advantages or blessings to keep focused on one single benefit. Second, to obtain any significant spacing, the mother would have to do ecological breastfeeding, and it can be demanding.
      Still, one person with a theological background was given this question and replied that “If a woman were breastfeeding with the SOLE or even PRIMARY intent of preventing ovulation, then, yes, she could be using her baby as a means to an end.” That sounds like a pejorative sense of “using.”
      Further, a friend has informed us that in its new teacher training program, the Couple to Couple League has written as follows: “As a matter of fact, if the only goal of breastfeeding is the infertility at the expense of the mother, the baby and/or the family, that could be a ‘use’ of the mother, baby and/or family. And as pointed out in ‘The Human Body,’ we should love people, and use things… not the other way around.” (“The Human Body” is a CCL publication.) The inclusion of “at the expense of the mother, the baby and/or the family” is not helpful for our basic question, but the whole sentence gives the impression that our hypothetical single-focus mother would be “using” in the pejorative sense.
      Let’s look at this in terms of a standard analysis of a human act as we did last week.
There are three factors that constitute the morality of a human act.
1) the thing done,
2) the circumstances, and
3) the intention of the person who acts.

      1) Let us focus on ecological breastfeeding in particular because that’s the only kind that offers extended infertility. In this case, the thing done is a basic human good. It is the form of baby care that gives the baby the best nutrition and nurturing.
      2) The circumstances are such that they do not affect the morality of the action. The mother is able to nurse, and the baby is able to suckle.
      Here we need to address CCL’s inclusion of extraneous circumstances, “at the expense of the mother, the baby and/or the family.” Adding extraneous circumstances completely confuses the issue, whatever it might be. Is it good for a mother to worship at Mass on Sunday for the sole purpose of pleasing God? Of course it is, even if there are also other very good reasons that she might not have in mind on any given Sunday. But now add “if it is done at the expense of a child who is so sick that he needs the full-time presence of his mother.” Clearly, the mother has a primary obligation to care for a desperately sick child, and for her to leave her child under those circumstances would be child abandonment and the wrong thing to do. So when we address the morality of breastfeeding for a single intention, we have to eliminate extraneous circumstances.
      3) The intention is the key issue here. Let’s state the question again and then rephrase it.
      Would a mother who chose to breastfeed solely for its baby-spacing effects be “using” her baby in the pejorative sense?
      In other words, would a mother who chose to breastfeed for the sole purpose of seeking the natural effect that God himself built into the nursing mother-baby ecology be “using” her baby in the pejorative sense? Not at all. She desires a God-given good, and the only way to achieve that good is to let her baby nurse frequently. How can anyone say the she would be “using” her baby in a pejorative sense of the word?

For the sake of argument, one might say that the hypothetical mother with her narrow focus has acted with less than the best intention. To that I would offer two responses. First, let’s assume that’s correct. We are required to act for a good intention, but there is no moral teaching of which I am aware that obliges us to act out of the best intention. That’s a concept that a person might discuss with his or her own spiritual advisor. I have heard of some saints who took a promise always to do the best thing, which I imagine would include or might include always acting for the highest intention, but I believe it would be rash for anyone to do so without good spiritual direction. It would be a recipe for scrupulosity and could tie a sensitive person into knots. Second, in the case at hand, the mother’s intention is to achieve a God-planned effect, not an unnatural effect. What can be wrong with that?

This issue should never be raised in the context of general instruction about breastfeeding because of 1) the risk of causing a scrupulous conscience and 2) the total unreality of the question in real life. In real life, the question would only apply to a mother who did ecological breastfeeding, for that’s the only kind that offers extended natural infertility. And in real life, a mother who started with only that limited intention would either soon stop ecological breastfeeding because of the demands of this form of baby care, or she would expand her horizons as she learned both from her own experience and from others the many other benefits of ecological breastfeeding.

To return to the question of intention, our hypothetical mother who chooses to do ecological breastfeeding only for its baby-spacing effects is not doing anything wrong or sinful. She has chosen to do what is best for her baby by all available measurements. She is simply focusing on one God-given effect instead of the big picture. Her limited intention is a good intention. She is not engaged in any form of contraceptive behavior. She allows her baby to nurse whenever he wants, but she cannot force her baby to nurse. Using a standard moral analysis, I cannot find anything wrong or sinful in the choice to do ecological breastfeeding solely for its baby-spacing effect, hypothetical as such a decision might be.

As far as I am concerned, the only thing wrong in this picture is the suggestion that such a mother may be acting wrongly, “using” her baby in a pejorative sense. That plants the seeds for a scrupulous conscience. In my opinion it is wrong to put into NFP instruction and teacher training such concepts that may lead sensitive moms to wonder, every time they pick up their babies, if they are “using” their babies in some sort of wrongful way.

To return to our opening question, what if a mom is feeling engorged, and she nurses solely, at that moment, for personal comfort? Is she using her baby? Of course she is. Is there anything the least bit wrong with that? Absolutely not. Does she love her baby any less because at that moment she is hoping that he will relieve her engorgement? Of course not. Let us be done with negative talk about “using” a breastfeeding baby.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, free, and readable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org.

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