Fertility
Natural family planning
Called to give life, spouses share in the creative power and fatherhood of God. “Married couples should regard it as their proper mission to transmit human life and to educate their children; they should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters. They will fulfill this duty with a sense of human and Christian responsibility.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2367
Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a way to cooperate with the natural pattern of fertility and infertility implanted in our bodies by God to achieve or postpone pregnancy. NFP uses natural signs of fertility in the woman’s body to indicate to a couple whether sexual intercourse will likely result in a pregnancy. Those couples who have a serious reason to postpone pregnancy can abstain from intercourse during the fertile phase of a woman’s cycle and have sexual intercourse only when she is infertile thus avoiding a pregnancy. NFP, unlike contraception, does not purposely cut off the possibility of conception through the use of artificial means. Rather, NFP allows a couple to choose when to engage in sexual intercourse and when to abstain using their knowledge of whether that act of intercourse will likely result in pregnancy.
Many people contend that NFP is morally equivalent to contraception since both methods result in not getting pregnant. Abstaining from sexual intercourse is never morally equivalent to interrupting conception. As human beings, we can choose freely whether to engage in sexual intercourse or not. A couple may abstain from intercourse for a number of reasons–sickness, birth of a child, travel, etc. Choosing to abstain to avoid pregnancy is a morally justifiable act. Deliberately interrupting the act of intercourse or the conception or development of a child through contraception is both morally evil and substantially different from NFP.
What is Theology of the Body?
College students are drinking it in, parents are holding study groups in their homes and dioceses are sponsoring seminars on it. If you mention it to those who know it, eyes light up and conversation picks up speed.
The “Theology of the Body” is sweeping across the country with its liberating message of the truth and meaning of human sexuality, really of human existence: educating, healing and inspiring.
Introduced to the world by Pope John Paul II in a series of 129 Wednesday audiences, the Theology of the Body expresses what God reveals about Himself and the human person in and through the body.
Made in the image of God, each of us is called to communion with Him through a total gift of ourselves, a.k.a., love. We have been created to participate, in the dynamic inner communion of love in the Trinity, poured out by Christ on His Bride the Church.
Stamped into every structure of our bodies is this call to mutual self-gift, to communion. Every time a man and woman come together in a “one flesh” union, their whole persons-all that they are-ought to be in communion, poured out for one another in total, free, fruitful and faithful love.
Since the body communicates who we are, it is in a sense, a language, and as with any language, the body can lie. The Theology of the Body is liberating people as they come to see what the body longs to communicate in truth, and recognize in their own experience those lies that have cheapened their relationships.
This “Gospel of the Body” contains not only the truth, but also the real hope for a total renewal in the way we think about and carry out our human loves.
Text courtesy: Sisters of Life
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