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The Catholic Church
Contraception and Natural Family Planning
Marriage is
an intimate,
lifelong partnership in which husbands and wives give and receive love
unselfishly. The sexual relationship expresses their married love and
shows
what it means to become "one body" (Genesis 2:24) and "one
flesh" (Mark 10:8, Matthew 19:6). The sexual union is meant to express
the
full meaning of a couple's love, its power to bind them together and
its
openness to new life.
The
Church
believes that God
has established an inseparable bond between the oneness and procreative
aspects
of marriage. The couple has promised to give themselves to each other,
and this
mutual self-giving includes the gift of their fertility. This means
that each
sexual act in a marriage needs to be open to the possibility of
conceiving a
child. "Thus, artificial contraception
is contrary to God's will for marriage because it separates the act
of
conception from sexual union" (United States Catholic Catechism for
Adults, p. 409).
A couple
need
not desire to
conceive a child in every act of intercourse. But they should never
suppress
the life-giving power that is part of what they pledged in their
marriage vows.
Serious
circumstances
financial, physical, psychological, or those involving responsibilities
to
other family members may affect the number and spacing of children. The
Church
understands this.
Helping
couples to deepen
conjugal love and achieve responsible parenthood is part of the
Church’s total
pastoral ministry to Catholic spouses. Fulfillment of this ministry
includes
both education and pastoral care. This means offering practical help to
those
who wish to live out their parenthood in a truly responsible way.
When
there is
a sufficient
reason to avoid or postpone pregnancy (the Church does warn against
selfishness
in family planning.) Natural Family Planning is a way of following
God’s plan,
it consists of ways to achieve or to avoid pregnancy using the physical
means
that God has built into human nature. These methods are based on
observation of
the naturally occurring signs and symptoms of the fertile and infertile
phases
of a woman's menstrual cycle. Couples using NFP to avoid pregnancy
abstain from
intercourse and genital contact during the fertile phase of the woman's
cycle.
No drugs, devices, or surgical procedures are used to avoid pregnancy.
The best
way
to learn NFP is
from a qualified instructor-one who is certified from an NFP teacher
training
program. Our Diocesan ( Respect Life Office) NFP Consultant
can help you to find an NFP class
in your area. (http://www.diogh.org/RespectLife/index.htm)
(http://www.diogh.org/RespectLife/index.htm)
We are
enormously grateful to
the Church for her constant teaching that sexuality must be open to the
transmission of life.
"Used
with permission from the NFP Program,
United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops. All rights reserved."
Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio
of Pope John Paul
II
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