Natural Family Planning International

    Someone asked me, “What IS compelling justification for sterilization?”  There is none.  What leads people to try to justify sterilization is fear.  Fear of another pregnancy and fear of the periodic abstinence involved in systematic natural family planning.  Just as perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18), so also perfect fear can cast out love, that is, what is supposed to be the self-giving love of the marriage act.
     In addition, each and every time the deliberately sterilized couple engage in the marriage act, they are engaging in an act of deliberately sterilized intercourse, defrauding the act of its built-in meaning as a renewal of their marriage covenant, for better AND for worse.  The contraceptive act of married spouses says, “We take each other for better but definitely and positively NOT for the imagined worse of possible pregnancy.”  That contradicts the built-in meaning of the marriage act and renders it dishonest.
     If a couple has been sterilized and are now repentant, they ought to have reversal surgery.  Then if they think they have sufficiently serious reasons to avoid pregnancy, they ought to monitor her fertility and abstain during the fertile time.  If health or finances or some other truly serious reason makes reversal surgery an extraordinary difficulty, they may not be obliged to have it, but they still ought to abstain during the fertile time as in the previous sentence. 
    This is not a harsh judgment.  It is simply realistic.  Most people would agree that repentance means having the attitude that “if I had it to do over again, I would not do it.”  With regard to sexual sterilization, that means they wouldn’t have undergone sterilization and would still be fertile.  If they had sufficiently serious reasons to avoid pregnancy, they would be monitoring her fertility and abstaining during the fertile time.  So my opinion above is simply saying that the repentant sterilized couple should be doing just what other couples are doing when they want to practice the morally right way of avoiding pregnancy.
    If you have not read it yet, I think you will like my work, Sex and the Marriage Covenant.  For example in Chapter 17, you will find my analysis of biblical texts that show that the Lord has condemned every form of sexual intercourse except the non-contraceptive act of spouses married to each other. Chapter 12, “The Sterilized Couple” is now available at our website under the title, “The Repentant Sterilized Couple.”
     Sex and the Marriage Covenant is a book that makes a good gift to a seminarian or a priest.
 
In the his service,
John F Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)