For the simple reason that the woman has no idea of the outcome of any act of intercourse, and doesn’t even know she’s carrying a fertilised egg.
I could argue that if a woman intends to use contraception by NFP (and that’s what her intention is), then the subsequent 3 times higher rate of zygote deaths is actually more culpable fhan using a contraceptive pill.
Thank you for providing the documentation (below). First, her discussion is geared toward the Protestant anti-Pill argument, which is that using the Pill is wrong because it is abortifacient, rather than the Catholic argument, which is that using any form of abc to prevent conception is inherently wrong.
And this may be the cause of your confusion regarding Catholic teaching on this point. For us, the evil is not in the resulting non-appearance of children but in the act of frustrating the end of the marital act. The intention to deny the possibility of any children who might result from the act taken is what goes against God’s will and is therefore sinful.
Second, the study referred to compared the number of unborn babies lost as a result of using the Pill, and the number lost when a woman is *not using birth control, *as was explained in the post to which your linked article referred.
Hence, the couple using NFP may lose 18% of any babies conceived at a time when they are presumably conceiving very few babies. Women using the Pill* will lose *every *baby conceived despite their use of the Pill (according to this scenario). If the methods fail at the same rate, then the users of the Pill would lose 5X the number of babies as the NFP users.
*These numbers for the Pill may actually be incorrect. AGI shows that a surprisingly large number of women going for abortions report using the Pill correctly; and more recent versions of the Pill apparently do not have the same abortifacient effect of earlier versions. I don’t know if these two facts are related at all.
I said I’d stop arguing the case as it’s going nowhere. However read the following link, and NFP is basically “without birth control”.
**ETA: **It is absurd to compare pregnancy rates of couples who are *not *trying to avoid conception with those who refrain from marital relations at the time when the wife is likely to conceive, so this point is pretty darned moot.
The chicken analogy is false, since I determine beforehand I’m going to kill a pre-existent chicken. In the case of the pill, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It would be more accurate to talk about eating a fertile egg compared to eating a non-fertile egg.
In the very early stages, you wouldn’t know which was which, would you?
The reason I brought this analogy in was that you said that a woman who lost a baby before implantation was “more culpable” than a woman on the Pill, since she conceived and therefore lost more babies as the Pill prevents most conception in the Pill-using women.
What I was trying to illustrate is that a natural occurrence such as the loss of an unborn baby has no culpability. Knowing that if I conceive 10 children, I am likely to lose at least one or two, am I culpable for the death(s) because I did not prevent their conception? Obviously not.
However, for a woman using the Pill knowing that the back-up mechanism is lack of implantation and subsequent death of the unborn baby, there is culpability. For a woman using the Pill *not *knowing that, there would not be personal culpability, but the objective fact would still remain that she took the action, unlike women using NFP, *who take no action. *
