Em, I'm looking for more correct information on NFP. Anyone?

Here’s the belated Think Again Thursday post, and one I’ve wanted to do for a couple weeks since I read about Cherie Blair’s latest verbal blunder regarding family planning.

Now Mrs. Blair’s no rookie in the Church teaching disobedience department. She’s a regular on the the-Church-should-change-her-teaching-on-contraception circuit, grinding her axe at every turn. In fact, the article prompting this latest edition of Think Again Thursday is a perfect example. It’s evidently a piece about her attitude about money, lifestyle and don’t miss this segueway, “Mrs Blair also says in the interview, in the January edition out on Thursday, that MPs have been pilloried over their expenses. ‘They saw it as an allowance, which is not the same thing.’…An ardent Catholic, she says she hopes that the Church will change its view on contraception.” I’m sorry, what does one have to do with the other? Journalism has gone as far downhill as faith.

Theological misinformation and journalistic disability aside, my beef is largely with this statement, which I believe my readers (of all faiths/ political viewpoints) will have a problem with (the money line in bold):

The Church says that sex is not just for procreation and does allow the natural form of contraception. Personally, I think it is better to go for contraception that works, which is quite different from abortion.

In this letter writing campaign, I’d like to find out if this is the correct quote, as the syntax here isn’t exactly the well-worded style of an experienced barrister.

That aside, it’s clear that legal education and worldly knowledge don’t exactly equal understanding and certainly not wisdom. Would you help me in blogging about this, and in particular by contacting Mrs. Blair to correct and clarify the statement that NFP doesn’t work?

My fellow Catholics may wonder why I’m not calling for a firm correction of her misunderstanding of Christian teaching on marriage, sexuality, family and family planning. I’m glad you asked. Personally, I will send her a Theology of the Body text, either Theology of the Body for Beginners (West) or Called to Love (Anderson), and will invite her to a further broadening of her and mind and formation. However, I don’t make as big a deal of it as I’d like to here because, frankly, she seems like a prideful person who’s more open to science than faith. And I’d really like her to see that even in a secular, medical sense–she’s wrong.

It is interesting that Mrs. Blair is clearly accomplished in a worldly sense, and is passionate about women’s issues, yet continues to promote health “services,” particularly contraception, that have NOT liberated women as originally thought. In this review of a number of sociological, economical and anthropological studies one thing is clear: free love wasn’t free, and contraception, the fuel for the sexual revolution, was less of a liberator and more of an arsonist for society. Ironically, women, minorities and children have suffered the most. “We must make it crystal clear that the church’s commitment to the poor requires nothing less than a vigorous proclamation of the church’s true and beautiful teaching about sex and marriage. In other words, we must make it clear that the preferential option for the poor begins in the home.” If Mrs. Blair is concerned about social justice for the women, children and the poor, then she needs to THINK AGAIN about her stance on contraception.

Contact information for Mrs. Blair:

Email: mediarequest@cherieblairoffice.org
Cherie Blair Foundation

Physical Address (c/o the Tony Blair Office):

The Office of Tony Blair
P.O. Box 60519
London
W2 7JU
United Kingdom

Guideline text:

[Salutation of your choice]

You have a wide reputation as an intelligent woman, and a proponent of women’s liberation and rights. I’m writing to say that I am as well, and I thank you for many of your efforts to promote social justice.

[Something brief about yourself.]

I’m also passionate about social justice, and have found personally that natural methods of family planning (or NFP) have been extremely liberating not only in my life, but in the life of women and families around the world. I found it interesting to note, however, in a recent interview that you were quoted as dismissing natural methods of family planning, saying “Personally, I think it’s better to go for contraception that works.” You are an educated and intelligent woman. Did you actually say this?

If so, not only does NFP “work” to postpone pregnancy, but this journal article from the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine even recommends that it’s something all OB/GYN’s and family practice physicians could benefit from learning and even teaching.

http://www.jabfm.org/cgi/content/full/22/2/147

You may also be interested in this study by UK researchers, in which lead researcher Dr Petra Frank-Herrmann said: “We maintain that the effectiveness of the Sympto-thermal method is comparable to the effectiveness of modern contraceptive methods such as oral contraceptives, and is an effective and acceptable method of family planning.” (Human Reproduction 2007 22(5):1310-1319; doi:10.1093/humrep/dem003)

For a clinical web site with information on one of several modern NFP methods with a medical imprimatur, see www.fertilitycare.org.

[optional:] I know that your unfavorable and under-informed opinion of NFP perhaps comes from a prejudice against the Catholic Church’s constant teaching on marriage and family which you see as oppressive, but be assured of two things: first, many, many users of NFP (or Fertility Awareness Method) are not Catholic, or even particularly religious. Second, the Church’s teaching are hugely misunderstood, but are being rediscovered anew in recent decades. They are joyfully embraced by youth and older adults alike, both by lifetime Catholics and those (like me) who lived the contraceptive life and found it wanting. I would like, for this reason to share a cause of my joy, and gift to you [item you're enclosing].

Thank you for your consideration.

Very Sincerely,

[an NFP fan]

…this blogger at Young Adult Catholics (little bit of a misnomer, since they reject many of the Churches teachings outright) seems to think it’s not.

I like that she puts the words “liberal Catholic” and “conservative Catholic,” thereby questioning the validity of political terms imposed on theological terms (The Church is not liberal or conservative; it’s Catholic–Universal). While she supports a person’s choice to choose natural methods of family planning (I got warm fuzzies), she remains neutral on the moral issues (namely the fact that most contraceptives are abortafacients to begin with, plus contra-love factor). I can deal with people who are against the Church’s teaching or don’t understand it, but someone who’s totally neutral? There’s nothing lamer than lukewarmness.

I appreciate that she’s trying to be loving and to extend an olive leaf, but her amicable branch is a thinly disguised vine of vitriol. There’s nothing more dangerous than indifference. A few words from wiser souls:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.–Our Lord Jesus, Gospel according to St. Matthew 10:34

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.–George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize Laureate

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.–Hellen Keller, author, political activist, lecturer

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference. –Edmund Burke, philosopher & statesman

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.–Soren Kirkegaard, philosopher & theologian

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.–Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel Laureate & author

It’s worth checking out for a minute. Take the “What’s your method?” poll, and comment away! There’s a nice potpourri of the usual unsubstantiated overpopulation claims, bad theology of marriage & sex (the r who “have no authority on the sex issue”), but there are a few nice counter comments. My favorite is,

As a website that promotes progressive forward thinking for 20-30 year old Catholics, I invite you to think forward to Dr. Janet Smith’s take on contraception and natural family planning…

Have you read John Senior?

A friend not too long ago recommended his book, “The Restoration of Christian Culture,” and told me a little about his life and times at Kansas University. Really, a heroic life. 

The precursor to the recommended book was a much more somber “The Death of Christian Culture.” Both books were actually a series of lectures given, and later published. Anyway, I ordered them both, and am reading Death right now. It’s intellectually satisfying, poetically written and frighteningly prophetic. I’ve been told the second one is much better. Since this one is brilliant, I can’t wait to read the next.

A little sample relevant to our themes of natural family planning, love, life and children:

It is no accident that decadence leads to the hatred of children…

Conversely, he affirms:

This is the economy of the private enterprise of love: it generates. Love is fecund. Love is not only a means to an end, like a road, but is a kind of propulsion. It is like walking up an escalator, or swimming with the current–to beget children, to love children, to encourage their growth, to ease their sufferings, and to suffer oneself with them, even to our death.

He’s elucidating the relationship between the decline of Christian culture and the denigration of children, using the case of a mother who was acquitted of murdering her week old child because she was special needs and did not want her. Yet the courtroom erupted in cheers when the verdict was announced.

He goes on to debunk Thomas Malthus, the disproved 19th century economist who predicted that England’s population would outrun its food sources by 1850. (How are we doing, England?)

 As I’ve said elsewhere, children are not the problem; they are the answer. People are not walking carbon footprints, but potential solutions to contemporary problems. 

Every time a child is born, not just a mouth to feed is born, but hands and brains. [ A quote in Senior's book from Josue de Castro, a founder and director of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, and one of the five or six world-renowned men in the field of human population problems.]

From Taking Charge of Your Fertility:

Do you realize that a part of every single one of us resided inside our maternal grandmother’s uterus, even before our own mothers were born? Unlike male fetuses which contain no sperm, female fetuses already contain all the eggs that the newborn child will ever have. What that means, practically speaking, is that when your mother was just a fetus inside hermother, she already had developed one of the eggs that eventually became you.

Wow.

While his views of celibacy were not on par with western Judeo-Christians, Gandhi understood that the Pill is wrought with personal and social poison.

“The abandonment of the reproductive funtion is the common feature of all sexual perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.”

That’s right, friends. A round of applause for the psychotherapist every sane person loves to hate.

A pro-fertility quote from one of humanity’s favorite pacifists, Gandhi:

Contraceptive Methods are “like putting a premium on vice. They make men and women reckless. Nature is relentless and will have full revenge for any such violation of her laws…If [contraceptive] methods become the order of the day, nothing but moral degradation can be the result. As it is, man has sufficiently degraded woman for his lust, and [contraception], no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her.”