My friend Jamie over on the Selkie blog made a very thoughtful statement this week:
But my hope is that reliable information about reliable natural methods of family planning will become as mainstream as apples in the produce aisle. Maybe I can help to make that happen.
As a Catholic woman and a blogger, I definitely could be better at getting the word out about Natural Family Planning. A comment JCecil made on my blog earlier this week definitely made me think about doing that more. Mr. Cecil writes:
Most Catholic married couples who contracept do not do so because they are ignorant of the Church’s teaching. Most know what the Church teaches, but they can’t make sense of it and don’t agree.
Well not in my experience. Since the poor catechesis of the past 30 years I think most Catholics have a vague idea that the church is against contraception, but they couldn’t explain the theology behind it if it was the $100 question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire!
Our society certainly hasn’t helped. NFP to the secular mind isn’t sexy! It’s not hot apparently to take responsibility for knowing your own body signs when the latest contraceptive pill can reduce your menstrual periods to four a year!
NFP also isn’t a good money maker. Afterall, once you know the method you own it!! It costs you nothing. So I guess there wouldn’t be a lot of incentive for an organization like Planned Parenthood to promote or teach it. In fact they act like they’ve never heard of it.
This quote by Suzanne Martinez, a vice president at Planned Parenthood made me laugh:
“What’s left? Condoms are bad. The Pill is bad. Emergency contraception is bad,” says Susanne Martinez, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for public policy. “I guess withdrawal is still OK.”
Wow, Ms. Martinez where have you been? What about Fertility Awareness? NaPro Technology? Billings Method? Natural Family Planning?
The truth is, Planned Parenthood will mention these things in some of their literatute, but I’ve seen it listed about on par with the withdrawal method. For an organization that seems to be so big on giving women freedom of choice, it’s amazing to me that they seem oblivious to the benefits of Natural Family Planning. But then I suspect benefitting women isn’t their true agenda anyway. Never has been.
Jamie, over on the Selkie Blog spoke to this earlier in the week.
I still think it’s a little odd that the Pill is so widely accepted. Is any other normal body function routinely suppressed in healthy women? Is there any other case in which we blithely use synthetic hormones to interrupt the conversation of hypothalamus and pituitary, to squelch normal organ function? Absolutely, the risk of complications like liver tumors, stroke, heart attack, gallbladder disease, retinal thrombosis, and death in Pill users is tiny. But every single case — as well as every case of nausea, headaches, mood swings, and the other less alarming but far more common side effects — every single one is iatrogenic, caused by medical intervention that interrupted a normal physiological process. If I were a doctor who had pledged “first do no harm,” that would give me pause.
Me too Jamie.
Apparently the other part of this is that as a Catholic woman and blogger I feel I have to get the word out on, that being anti-artificial contraception doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to limit family size or postpone babies for just reasons. Several comments I received this week led me to believe that folks believe that that is what I’m advocating. I’m not and neither does the church.
Some comments:
Married women are not baby factories–if don’t condemn the rest of us who only want to avoid debt and hunger at this stage in our lives.
The commitment to responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, “keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties towards God, themselves, their families and human society” (HV 10). One cannot therefore speak of “acting arbitrarily.”
Absolutely and I’ve never said otherwise. The trick then I suppose is to let folks know that “keeping a right order” is possible without the use of artificial contraceptives, and that in fact, it is impossible to keep with them.
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