Does natural family planning really work?

[Lara]

Nice to read all the positive responses.

I think you need to take things one step at a time. You will have the capacity to make decisions as you go along. The important thing is to trust in God and also in yourselves. But limiting yourself to two children before you even have kids is a mistake. You could even have natural triplets in your second pregnancy, as happened to my aunt and uncle.

You also get smarter the more children you have and plan spending time/money/energy better.

Plus, all the joy kids bring to your family can make you a better worker. You may end up with a better job that requires less energy than the one you have. All sorts of good things can happen to you.

 

[emilysue]

Well, I’m also an adoptive parent, and I have to say I strongly disagree.

All adoption involves trauma, and you’re correct to point this out. Even for a child placed for adoption just after birth, adoption does involve a tremendous loss – the loss of the child’s birth mother. But does that mean adoption is a sin? Not in any way. A birth mother who places her child for adoption is making a very difficult choice that she believes to be in her child’s best interest. The exact reasons she believes adoption is in her child’s best interest vary from mother to mother, but no birth mother enters into an adoption plan lightly or selfishly. Adoption of infants has significantly declined since the legalization of abortion in the USA – roughly 18,000 infant adoptions yearly across the entire USA, compared to a high of 175,000 in 1970. Many women who in the past might have chosen to place a child for adoption, now choose to abort. (Others, of course, choose to raise their child as the stigma of single motherhood is lessened now.)

And then there are many children who are adopted later in life, after enduring much more trauma at their birth parents’ hands by neglect or abuse. That group is a much larger number of adoptions lately in the USA – nearly 50,000 adoptions from US foster care annually. Parents who have adopted from the foster care system could tell you stories that would make you want to vomit. But those stories are their children’s realities. Those children suffer the trauma of losing their birth parents as well as the trauma of their birth parents’ actions. In an ideal world, their birth parents would have never neglected or abused them. But obviously, we live in a fallen world. Sometimes, foster care is necessary for children’s protection, and sometimes thereafter adoption by a new family the most appropriate permanent plan.

 

[PrayforHisrightWay]

I think adoption is a sin like abortion if one is not doing so because of drugs or mentally or emotionally healthy enough to have any. But if’s it just because of it’s more than wanted or may reduce their lifestyle, then yes it’s a sin of self love, not loving youth. And it’s a sin of society if Christians don’t work to change society to help families stay together by healing parents, fix broken greed standards and fix broken dysfuncational school societies that allow social emotional bullies to breed and harm other youths to be outcasts and use drugs and drop out, not able to be healthy parents kids need cause they are using drugs, etc. The goal of Christians is to create a society for healthy families so no adoption is necessary.( unless both parents died), this fillfuls the 2nd commandment.

 

[TheLittleLady]

But when you are in a catholic married you have woved to accept and raised the children God what to give you.

Catholic marriage vows are to “lovingly accept children”. While rare, there are circumstances where adoption is the most loving thing for the child. It is rare, but, do not tell the parent who makes that difficult but noble choice that they are breaking a vow or as the above poster said “aborting a soul”. That is cruel and an error.

 

[Anicette]

@TheLittleLady,

I agree with you, I will not tell the parents that.

Just what shocked me is the choice posed as a non-yet-married person between NFP will work or adoption… but I am not in the position to judge or understand as I have never have face this choice in my life…