Intro to Contraception

Dear high school students,

I’m sure you’ve all seen on the news about the federal contraception mandate and the Catholic uproar over it. You can read on the news what happened and how Catholics are reacting. I want you to understand why contraception is such a big deal.

We’ve talked before about how doing things God’s way is good for you. That’s true about sex and contraception, too.

God designed sex to be amazing. He designed sex to be a way for spouses to give themselves completely to each other, to strengthen their commitment to each other, and to produce children. When they express their love for each other this way, that love may become a child. And that’s beautiful. Sex allows married couples to participate in God’s love and in his creation.

Our culture today accepts all sorts of things that violate the sanctity of marriage and sexuality. One of these is contraception. Contraceptive sex is sex on our terms, not on God’s terms. Contraceptive sex says “I want the pleasure right now, but I don’t want the responsibility of raising children.” Contraceptive sex cannot be an act of total self-giving and isn’t an act of love -- remember, God designed sex to be an act of love. Contraceptive sex is using the other person for sexual pleasure.

God designed our bodies to work a certain way, and contraception interferes with that. Our bodies are naturally fertile. It’s healthy to be fertile. Advocates of contraception speak as if fertility (especially women’s fertility) were a defect and as if pregnancy were a disease. It’s not. Having a functioning reproductive system is just as healthy as having a functioning digestive system or a functioning respiratory system. God made our bodies to work a certain way, and it’s good and healthy when our bodies work the way God designed them.

The Catholic Church does not teach that once you’re married, you have to have sex all the time and have as many babies as your body can handle. We all know that sex can naturally result in children. But it doesn’t always. That’s because women’s bodies are designed to have fertile cycles -- there are only a few days per month when it’s possible for a woman to get pregnant. When a couple has sex during a time when the woman is naturally infertile, she can’t get pregnant. It’s possible (and, actually, not that hard) to learn how to tell when a woman is naturally fertile or infertile, and if a couple has a good reason to postpone a pregnancy, they can abstain from having sex when the woman is fertile. God designed women’s bodies to go through these cycles naturally. He also designed our brains so we can learn how to do this. The Catholic Church teaches that couples must be open to having children, but if there are times in their marriage when having a child seems unwise, they are permitted to abstain from sex during fertile times to postpone pregnancy. This is called Natural Family Planning, and you can find more about it at www.ccli.org.

NFP isn’t just another form of contraception. By having contraceptive sex, the couple abuses the sanctity of marriage and sex. By not having sex during fertile times, a couple is simply not having sex. With contraception, the couple does not want children. With NFP, the couple thinks that, because of their circumstances, it’s unwise to have children right now, but they are open to life. With any method of contraception or with NFP, there can be surprise pregnancies. With contraception, surprise pregnancies are called “mistakes” or “failures.” With NFP, surprise pregnancies are called “children.”

That’s the Church’s teaching in a nutshell. If you have more questions, let me know and I will be happy to answer them.

Here’s a little more information on contraception and NFP:

● Many people think that NFP is not effective at preventing pregnancy. That’s not actually true. A 2007 study showed that NFP is 99.6% effective when used properly.

● NFP couples have healthier marriages and almost never divorce.

● Side-effects of chemical contraceptives (including the birth control pill) include nausea, vomiting, weight gain, and infertility. NFP doesn’t have any side effects, and when you’re ready to have children, you don’t have problems with infertility.

● NFP doesn’t cost any money. You need a thermometer, and you need to be able to stick it under your tongue. And you need a pencil, so you can record your information. Birth control pills can cost $15 to $50 a month, according to Planned Parenthood.

● NFP is better for the environment. We all know that it’s bad to put chemicals in food and let chemicals drain into our lakes and rivers. Why would we put chemicals in our bodies (and let them drain into our lakes and rivers) if we don’t need to?

● When the inventors of the birth control pill were testing the pill on women, three women died. They didn’t bother investigating whether the pill caused their deaths.

Women, don’t let our culture tell you that pregnancy is a disease or that your fertility is a problem. Men don’t take pills or use chemicals to interfere with how their bodies work naturally - why should we? Fertility is good and healthy, and motherhood is a beautiful thing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Save sex for when you’re married, and if you marry, be open to life. Here is a quote from Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty:

“The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral - a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body. The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature. God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation. What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother?”

AMDG
Mary

PS Luke wrote something for the guys:


Guys,

Contraception is unmanly. I’m not going to tell you it’s bad, because that’s what the rest of this letter is for. I’m going to tell you why it’s unmanly. As men, we have a special duty to take care of women. So if there’s one thing that men (real men, that is) don’t do, it’s take advantage of women.

It takes two to have a baby. And the way God designed things, it takes two not to have a baby. Mary explained how this works in the section about NFP. Both people have to do their part. Basically every kind of contraception (except condoms) works by messing up how women’s bodies work so that they’re not fertile. So instead of it taking two, contraception makes women do all the work.

Again, if there’s one thing that men don't do, it’s take advantage of women. If we’re not willing to abstain for a few days per month so that women don’t have to pump a bunch of chemicals into their bodies, then we’re not taking care of women, we’re taking advantage of them. We’re saying to them “I want to have sex whenever I want, so mess up your body so I don’t have to abstain.” If you're not married, you shouldn't be having sex in the first place. If you are married and there’s a good reason not to have a baby, do things the right way and do your part.

Be a man.

Luke

P.S. And ladies, don’t settle for men who don’t live up to this.

pro-life documentary

trailer

I don't know much about this, but it looks pretty good.

environmentally friendly morality

I'm always a little irritated when I hear about population control or the irresponsibility of having more than so many kids. I found this article while deleting accidentally-saved drafts on maple footprints, and I decided to write about it after all.

When I'm finished with a gallon of milk, I throw the bottle in my car and, when I go home, add them to our recycling bin in the garage. I keep a hamady bag next to my desk and fill it with scrap paper (rough drafts of essays, map quiz practice sheets, outdated flyers I've removed from bulletin boards). I use some of it to make lists or so I don't get acrylic paint on the carpet, and whatever I've collected by the time I go home next gets tossed in the recycle bin at St. John Vianney. Clothes I don't wear anymore go to St. Luke's Street Ministry; clothes too worn-out to wear I make into something else. For the most part, I avoid using paper napkins. I made a gift for a friend from a green glass balsamic vinegar jar; I filled an emptied peanut butter jar with cough drops. I shy away from bottled water. I walk to Mass and the grocery store when I can. On my shelf right now are a burned-out lightbulb and an empty 10-oz apple juice bottle, waiting to be turned into projects.

I am thrifty (read: stingy) and I honestly enjoy walking, but most of these environmentally-friendly activities come from a desire to treat the earth with respect. We ought to: it is a gift from God.

But the earth is not God, and we need to remember to keep our duties in perspective. As a student I have a moral obligation to complete my schoolwork thoroughly; however, if a friend had a rough day and needs my shoulder and my ear the night before an exam, I ought to hug my friend. Love for God first and neighbors second should rule our lives; other duties follow.

Caring for the earth -- treating so great a gift with respect -- should flow from, not supersede, our primary duty to love.

Here we need to distinguish between love of humanity and love of neighbor. It's easy to "love humanity," for humanity is merely a collection of our neighbors, minus what makes them actually human.. We can "love humanity" without having to deal with a human response. We can "love humanity" but this love carries with it no risk of rejection and it is therefore a cheap form of love.

We were specifically instructed to love our neighbors, and our neighbors are real people. They have faces and middle names and favorite colors. The hairs on their heads have been counted. These are the people we ought to love. Your spouse and children are real people; the ozone layer is not. Contracepting to reduce greenhouse gases is putting humanity ahead of neighbor, promoting a vague, faceless cause instead of loving people.

The lede paragraph in the article asks: "Will there be enough food? Enough water? Will planet-heating carbon dioxide gas become ever more uncontrollable?" These are horrible questions to consider when planning a family.

First of all, we shouldn't really "plan a family." Just as the Son is love become incarnate, so too ought children be love become incarnate. There's a reason the "how to make babies" talk begins with "when a man loves a woman..." Love transforms from an abstract concept to a physical being, a child conceived in his mother's womb. "Family planning" involves an attitude of "I love you, but let's decide when/whether to let our love become incarnate," which is simply wrong.

Secondly, given the amount of food we waste in this country, we really shouldn't pretend that we worry about food quantity. Food will never be appropriately distributed over the entire world, and if we did run short, I don't think we would notice. We would continue to eat our dinners and ignore larger parts of world.

Third, though food is necessary for survival on a physical level, we are not merely physical beings. We are also spiritual beings who will live forever. How does fasting appear in the light of eternity? I don't want to trivialize starvation, only point out that it is an evil suffered, not an evil committed. Evils suffered damage the body; evils committed damage the soul. The human race has survived famine before; we can probably do it again.

Quoth the article: "If you are serious about your carbon footprint, think: birth control."

Interestingly enough, artificial forms of birth control are really really bad for the environment. The Pill is essentially a collection of hormones, bad for the environment and bad for your body. (Honestly, why would you want to mess with women's hormones more than necessary anyway?) With other forms of artificial contraception, the packaging and the items themselves get thrown away, filling landfill space, or left in a parking lot or in the woods, littering. The factories that produce these products and their packaging also produce greenhouse gases.

One way to avoid having children is to abstain, or to abstain during fertile cycles (which you can figure out easily if you have a thermometer). This leaves no carbon footprint whatsoever.

At heart, though, this isn't an issue of the methods of preventing conception but whether to prevent conception at all. Every time a husband and wife express their love this way, they must know that their love might become incarnate and they must be open to this possibility. Otherwise, they are qualifying their love and love must not be qualified. Love doesn't come with modifiers, dangling or not. Love does not precede a cum clause. Love is not followed by conjunctions. Love is "I (completely) love (completely) you (completely)," not "I love you, but let's be careful" or "I love you when you're not fertile."

The article continues: "The greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more significant than the amount any American would save by such practices as driving a fuel-efficient car, recycling or using energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances," according to the study.

This begs the question: which children are extras and who decides? Look my little sister, kid #5, in the eye and tell her. I dare you.

The article goes on to say that "under current U.S. consumption patterns, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of an average parent--about 5.7 times a person's lifetime emissions, he calculates."

The writers of Our Sunday Visitor's Daily Take blog comment better than I ever could:

First of all, what is that even supposed to mean? If we start thinking about our future children in terms of how many metric tons of carbon dioxide they will produce, we may need to consider the possibility that perhaps we are not called to the vocation of motherhood and fatherhood in the first place.

The article mentions that this awkward statistic takes place "under current U.S. consumption patterns." Who's to say that these "extra children" will follow current U.S. consumption patterns? Most couples having "extra children" (we'll say more than two) tend toward the Catholic/homeschooling variety -- countercultural enough not to follow the current consumption patterns. They are probably wearing hand-me-downs, driving vans and buying food in bulk. They probably don't take long or frequent road trips, leave a big-screen TV flashing at all hours or fill landfill space with used contraceptives. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a normal family of seven or eight leaves a carbon footprint similar to that of a normal family of three or four. Big families just don't follow normal consumption patterns.

In the light of eternity, how much of this matters? The heavens and the earth, including the ozone layer, will pass away, and when it does my carbon footprint will be erased. My first duty is to love God, and from my love for him flows a desire to respect the gifts he has given me. I will recycle not for the greater good of the vague mass we call humanity, but to express my gratitude to so great a Creator.