Is it wrong to breastfeed if it's used as contraception?

[jenaroni813]

My professor talked to a priest who told her that the Catholic Church only allows women to breastfeed for a certain number of weeks. After that it is considered a form of contraception. Is this true?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

No. The Church does not limit breastfeeding. As for breastfeeding’s use as a birth-control method, this priest (assuming your professor is representing this conversation accurately) obviously misunderstands both the science of breastfeeding and the Church’s stance on birth regulation.

• Breastfeeding only “works” as a means of preventing pregnancy if it is done in a long-term, exclusive fashion that Catholic breastfeeding advocate Sheila Kippley of the Couple to Couple League calls “ecological breastfeeding,” and which most women in Western countries do not practice (which isn’t to say they “shouldn’t,” only that to do so is considered counter-cultural). Because this practice of long-term, exclusive breastfeeding is so uncommon to Western society, many Westerners think that the idea that breastfeeding can prevent pregnancy is merely an old wives’ tale.
• Generally speaking, nursing mothers of the animal kingdom (including human females when they practice “ecological breastfeeding”) do not become pregnant because nature, in a certain sense, “recognizes” that a nursing mother already has an infant that needs her care and so the return of the nursing mother’s menstrual period is naturally delayed.
• The Church recognizes that God, through the biological nature he created, gives female animals and human women natural “seasons” in which they are fertile and infertile. So long as a human couple does not engage in marital relations and then deliberately frustrate its life-giving potential by using artificial contraception, the Church does not object to a husband and wife abstaining from marital relations during the fertile period. And on the flip side, since there is no sin in a woman who is permanently infertile engaging in marital relations with her husband, there cannot be sin for a woman who is experiencing a natural period of temporary infertility (whether it’s brought on by breastfeeding or anything else) to engage in marital relations.
• Again, assuming your professor represented her conversation with this priest accurately, I think this story illustrates the danger of authorities in one discipline assuming that their expertise extends beyond their own discipline. This priest should have given your professor the Church’s teaching on the morality of contraception without presuming to give such a definitive negative assessment of breastfeeding. That he did so, especially since he is a priest, opens the Church to scoffing by those who understand the science of breastfeeding better than he but do not understand the Church at all.