Is NFP Just "Catholic Birth Control?"
/BRIDGET BUSACKER
Is Natural Family Planning (NFP) just “Catholic Birth Control?”
The Church’s teaching on the use of Natural Family Planning and the distinction between it and the various forms of contraception can be difficult to understand. I myself have struggled to find a concise way of explaining it.
This article will break down the differences between them and provide you some resources to help you learn more.
PHOTOGRAPHY: SARAH WIRTH PHOTOGRAPHY
What’s NFP again?
NFP is the terminology used by the Roman Catholic Church to embrace the teachings on Theology of the Body and the application of fertility awareness based methodology.
The Catholic Church embraces - and encourages couples to embrace - the integration of faith and science in their marriage. She supports women understanding their bodies for greater self-awareness, which leads to greater self-control. Not birth control.
Read more: NFP: What It Is, How It Works, and Why it is a Blessing to Married Couples
A virtue builder
Let’s not pretend that NFP isn’t hard. Sometimes, as in the case of abstinence, it can be downright painful. But, this is where the spiritual reality of NFP must be paired with the physical reality of charting.
Fertility awareness is an amazing tool for a woman and/or couple to utilize in order to better understand and respect the female physiology. By choosing to practice Natural Family Planning and discern family life together, you challenge the cultural narrative (dating back to the Fall of Adam and Eve) of treating individuals as objects rather than persons.
When we actively practice NFP in marriage, we seek to love the other beyond ourselves, our own desires, and even our wounds because in doing so we choose to deny ourselves for the sake of the other.
We tend to glorify the sacrificial, brooding love in young lovers, but we despairingly laugh when this type of sacrificial love is practiced in true, sometimes awkward, intimacy in marriage.
NFP challenges a husband and wife to love each other in creative ways and navigate difficult seasons of abstinence. It allows sex to be truly unitive and couples to have a love that is free, total, faithful, and fruitful.
We have to be willing to re-integrate a worldview of virtue back into our bedrooms.
This can be hard when a common American lifestyle prioritizes the global good over the local good, and preaches a gospel of personal sacrifice to gods of degeneration: money, food, pleasure.
But ours is a God of “generation,” that is, of life.
The practical aspects of NFP
NFP challenges married couples to discern and have important conversations about family life and the intention of achieving pregnancy.
Hormonal contraception presents an unnatural and frankly, offensive approach to the female physiology by shutting down a healthy, functioning system. These synthetic hormones create withdrawal bleeds in women (no, it’s not a real period) and can cause a host of other health problems.
But, what about a condom? There are no hormones messing the system up and it’s responsible, right?
According to the Catholic Church and our understanding of sacrificial love, no, it’s not. It’s a bandaid solution to a deeper reality: our fear of sacrifice to love fully.
The use of contraception (both hormonal and barrier methods) may seem like an easier solution, but would it point us to the deeper reality of a free, total, faithful, fruitful love? Would it help us become saints? Of course not!
Something that contraception doesn’t allow for: conception.
The beauty of NFP is its ability to not only avoid pregnancy as needed, but to also achieve pregnancy with a holistic approach to and respect of a woman’s body in its entirety. It’s welcoming the man and woman’s bodies into the marriage fully, without muzzling any part of them. That is full love.
I don’t know about you, but the fact that my husband doesn’t ask me to shut down part of myself makes me feel fully loved and respected as a woman.
NFP integrates new life (either potential or actual) and existing life, that of two loving spouses. Contraception sterilizes the act, dislocating the life-giving nature of sex.
PHOTOGRAPHY: SARAH WIRTH PHOTOGRAPHY
A love that is procreative & unitive
NFP is not “Catholic birth control” because it embraces the Catholic Church’s teaching that sex is intended to be both procreative and unitive.
This doesn’t mean that you are supposed to try to conceive every time you have sex; instead, it means that you must discern your family life together as a couple, through embracing the woman’s reproductive system and her fertility.
The woman’s body is designed by our Creator with times of fertility and infertility, just as in the Creation account, God both worked and rested.
If you discern that you need to avoid pregnancy for a season (refer to Humane Vitae in the additional reading list below for a framework of discernment), then you abstain from sex during the fertile period of the woman’s cycle. In doing so, you are not taking away one of two integral aspects of sex.
This is a difficult teaching, but only a fool would argue that virtue should be avoided because it is difficult.
This is a bold and radical way of living; you are invited to surrender and trust the Lord in a new (and sometimes difficult) way. By choosing to practice NFP, you choose to fully embrace your spouse, your fertility, and the plan God has for your life.
Additional reading:
Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI
Why NFP is not Contraception by the USCCB
Why I don’t refer to Fertility Awareness as Contraception by Emily Frase
Natural Family Planning and the Myth of Catholic Contraception by Michael Wee
If you liked this article, we hope you enjoy this episode of the Spoken Bride podcast featuring Bridget Busacker.
About the Author: Bridget Busacker is a public health communications professional and founder of Managing Your Fertility, a one-stop shop for NFP/FABM resources for women and couples. She is married to her wonderful husband, David, and together they have a sweet daughter.
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