NFP and Suffering

The biggest complaint about NFP is that it stinks not being able to have sex with your spouse.  The rest of the method — observing and charting and all of that — may not be the funnest thing ever, but it beats having surgery or putting weird chemicals into your body, and compared to all the other things parents do, really it’s no big deal.  But not having sex with your spouse?  That stinks.

And so people complain, rightly, “We shouldn’t have to abstain.”

No, you shouldn’t.

We live in a fallen world.  There should be no hunger, no murder, no sickness, no death.  But there is.  Not because there should be, not because these things are right and natural and all part of what man was made for, but because our world is broken, and the ultimate fix is for the next life, not this one.

“We shouldn’t have to abstain” is also the argument for contraception.  Couples instinctively know that their calling is for intimacy and physical union.  They mistakenly conclude that whatever enables intercourse is therefore good.

The mistake is in thinking that sex can be separated from procreation.  If I have this sense that as a couple we ought to be engaging in intercourse at will, and if a pregnancy would cause a serious problem at this time, the conclusion of contraception is that I ought to keep the sex but avoid the pregnancy.

NFP says: No.  The two cannot be separated.  If pregnancy needs to be avoided, then intercourse will have to avoided, because you may not separate sex from procreation.  (Nor procreation from sex.)  The way in which we bring into the world new eternal souls is sacred.  It is set apart.

The trouble is that in promoting NFP, we mistakenly compare it to contraception.  It is as effective for avoiding pregnancy.  It is as easy to master.  And, sometimes you will be told, “Well, it’s only a few days a month that you need to avoid”.  In other words, you’ll hardly notice.

And we think therefore that NFP should involve no suffering.  No difficulty.  Because that is what contraception claims: Have all the free sex you want!  The free sex you surely need!  It pains you, as a married couple to abstain!  Surely your marriage requires sex at will, right?

What we forget, is that NFP is only there as a response to a serious problem.

If the world were not broken, there would be no NFP.  Couples would marry, and children would come.  There would be no infertility, no miscarriages, no stillbirths.  No pregnancy complications.  No breastfeeding difficulties, nor pregnancies too close one after the other.  No health problems that limited how many children one could bear and rear.  No concern about feeding or caring for or sheltering the children.  No mental health disorders.  None of these countless ways that many couples find they cannot simply have sex at will, for the world is broken.

NFP seeks to lighten the load.  It seeks to lessen the suffering that this broken world imparts.  But like a kindly nurse in the ICU, or a compassionate police officer at the scene of the crime, nothing can erase the underlying World Gone Wrong.   If I’m using NFP, it means there is some kind of problem in my life.

The suffering is not imaginary.  It is not particularly surprising, even.  It’s a broken world.  NFP is a moral means to take the edge off the pain, but it’s still a broken world.