#144- I agree that it is possible to engage in sexual intercourse, with various forms of birth control, and still maintain in one’s mind and heart the willingness to accept a pregnancy and baby if one occurs. This is essentially what I was trying to say in #139. However, it is easier to put aside the awareness or to pretend that sex does not cause babies if one is using birth control, particularly a highly effective method such as sterilization. Other methods, such as condoms, make it more obvious. It’s most obvious with NFP. Although one can also put aside the awareness during use of NFP.

I think I am in agreement with Matt Evans’ reasoning that a moral basis for human birth control cannot be based on animal birth control.

Rosalynde, I appreciate your careful apprehension of the Catholic position, and your diligence in general to “hear” accurately. I respect that immensely. I have not based my position on the Catholic [papal] position, but I have found myself very close to it in this and other points. Not identical, but very similar.

#149- just to be clear on the record, no, I don’t think that a higher “accidental” pregnancy rate is evidence for a moral superiority of NFP. I do think that a higher rate of pregnancy that occurs from couples who decide to have noncontracepted intercourse on a day of fertility knowingly (not an accident, not a method failure, but some contraceptive advocates still insist that this is a “user failure”) is pretty clear evidence that NFP helps couples to tip the scales of their family planning choices more in favor of having children than couples using other methods family planning, some of which tip the scales very far in the other direction. Which way one thinks the scales ought to be tipped is a value judgment; it’s pretty clear where most of the world is on this value judgment. It’s also pretty clear that the LDS Church is quite pronatalist. None of this is to say that couples cannot or should not avoid pregnancy if they feel they have sufficient reason to do so.

Perhaps it could be said this way. In one viewpoint, the default is to allow procreation to occur normally, with reasonable and appropriate exceptions that could go to the point of absolutely avoiding for serious reasons. This seems to me to be consistent with the LDS Church doctrine.* It also seems to me to be most naturally realized with NFP as compared to other methods of family planning.

In the other viewpoint, the default is to not procreate. Procreation is the exception, and should occur only once a couple decides they have overwhelming reasons to do so- and they shouldn’t do it to any excess. This is the world’s position (oversimplifying slightly). And for this position, NFP is the hardest method of family planning. Excluding sterilization, the natural method for this viewpoint would be probably be the IUD, followed by the 3-month shot (depo-provera), followed by the daily birth control pill.

* “How many children should a couple have? All they can care for! Of course, to care for children means more than simply giving them life. Children must be loved, nurtured, taught, fed, clothed, housed, and well started in their capacities to be good parents themselves. Exercising faith in God’s promises to bless them when they are keeping his commandments, many LDS parents have large families. Others seek but are not blessed with children or with the number of children they desire. In a matter as intimate as this, we should not judge one another.”
Dallin H. Oaks (1993, November). The great plan of happiness. Ensign 23 (11), 72–75.

On that note, let me reiterate that it is the couple’s responsibility and privilege to make choices about what kind of family planning to use, according to their own council, prayer, and circumstances.

Then I wrote in it in red ink. Before I realized what I was doing. Well, I was studying. What a guy, huh?

Just relating to Catholicism. No sex talk here.

I didn’t think that RW was trying to be normative. Rather, since my own spiritual identity rests on quite a different foundation I wanted her to say more about her own sense of things so I could try to understand her perspective a little better.

RW, thanks of the clarification. You echoed the same sort of idea, however, when you wrote that you feel “intense anxiety about aging past childbearing years.” You describe this state of mind as a sort of pathology, but I wonder if you could say more about this anxiety as you experience it personally. It is so far outside my own experience that I can’t even relate to it. Is this simply a fear of getting older? Certainly older women are more prone to disease, disability and death than younger women, but it seems like there’s something specific to losing the ability to bear children that causes this aging anxiety for you. Since my own identity has very little to do with childbearing (obviously I ovulate and menstruate monthly but other than these biological processes I don’t think of myself as a childbearer) I’m fascinated by such “intense anxiety” at the prospect of losing this capacity.

Good to hear from you. We don’t have an official position on birth control and so forth–we rely on each matrimony to personally engage the issue with study and prayer–suggestions like yours for helpful readings are greatly appreciated. Thanks for tip.

Adam: this thread’s unexpected swerve from the theology of birth control to the theology of weed control puts one of my favorite, if in this context quite tangential, anecdotes just within reach. I was working as a telephone pollster, and at the time I was calling people in southern utah and asking them questions about water conservation.

Me (from script): Do you practice xerascaping?
La Verkin Resident: What the heck is that?
Me: It’s the practice of landscaping with plants native to the area and climate.
Him: Hmmm, well, I reckon I do then, cuz everything in my yard grew there by itself!

Obviously, a brother with a reverence for Creation and a devotion to letting nature run its course.

For those interested in probably the most coherent and compelling treatment of NFP, contraception, and natural law (by a Catholic moral philosopher), I recommend various writings by Germain Grisez. He wrote a book called “Contraception and the Natural Law” in 1963; he has further developed the ideas in that book and are most completely found in his 3 (soon to be 4) volume, “The Way of the Lord Jesus.”

Volume 3, “Difficult Moral Questions,” is the most straightforward way into Grisez’s writings, I think.

Thanks again.