I think you missed what I said. I said the test should be if the condition is serious enoough for you to abstain from sex. If you have serious enough reason for you to abstain then you may have a case for NFP.
Thanks for clarifying, I missed this too. I don’t know that the church teaches this precise sentiment, but I may agree with you that this is generally a good guideline. However, it doesn’t take into account that some couples find it much easier to abstain than others.
Example: For DH and I, abstaining is pretty easy and doesn’t harm our marriage relationship in our experience (we had to abstain for 6 months during the second half of breastfeeding infertility). For us, the “we’d be willing to abstain completely” bar is very low. This reasoning would seem to imply that avoiding pregnancy so that we could pay for our children’s college would be acceptable for us. Of course, our ability to participate in the creation of new life should not actually be put on hold to pay for a child’s college, even if we find it easy to abstain.
Also, I wanted to bring up the point that some people are much more fertile than others - and this does affect the amount of restraint they need to exercise to be prudent. You mentioned the fact that you had a period of four years without birth control and without children. This implies that you are not as fertile as some people (although with five children, you don’t seem to be experiencing infertility either) and may not understand how God can call us to restraint in exercising the gift of extreme fruitfulness.
Another example from my life: In my family, sex while fertile = pregnancy. Very rarely does it take more than one month to conceive. A two-year gap without birth control is unheard of. My mother had seven children in eight years. I clearly seem to have inherited this fertility. DH and I have opened our marriage fully to life only one month in the entire four years we have been married, and God responded richly by blessing us with two children. We have no reason to believe God will withhold this responsiveness from us in the future, and therefore have opted for restraint for now so we can reorder our lives to accomodate that responsiveness.
Using “grave” reasons only as sufficient reason to exercise restraint likely means we will have fewer children in the end, as we would probably spend a great deal of time on the edge of a financially grave situation and need to abstain almost constantly; every time we were no longer in immediate risk of homelessness if I became pregnant, we would cease abstaining and I would probably become pregnant within a month - returning us to near-poverty when I lost my job, since DH cannot support the family on his own. It would be a very difficult cycle to endure, with years of financial recovery between pregnancies. Restraint now - while we save enough that I can start a home business that I can maintain while pregnant, to supplement DH’s insufficient income, and while DH studies so he can earn a larger income - means the hope to fully exercise our fruitfulness fully and prudently in the future
and less risk of extreme poverty.
You have been blessed with a call to entrust your family to God and seek fruitfulness without restraint, if I understand your story correctly. That is a beautiful calling and a wonderful witness to God’s power in your lives. But it’s not a calling that everyone shares. I hope this comes across well; although I do think you are being more strict than the church in your interpretations, I also think you are seeking to help others inform their consciences. The examples you give of NFP for frivilous things like so kids can go to college on the parents’ dime are definitely not sufficient reason to abstain, but this does not mean that all situations that are serious but not grave are insufficient.
Out of curiousity, do you think the desire to have a stay-at-home parent is adequate reason to abstain? I would not call it “grave reason to avoid pregnancy”, but it still seems adequate reason to me (although such families would hopefully be looking for other ways to balance their budget). I do know of at least one family where the already-full-time mother took a second part-time job to afford a child sooner (her husband also works, and they juggle shifts to always have one parent at home so that they can homeschool), and she expects to continue working this schedule with a few months of the child’s birth or less to avoid going into debt - but to me, that seems excessive to ask of most families even though I would hardly call her circumstances “grave”.
But, that said, from participating in various parish activities, I know what my fellow parishioners think, and it’s not very orthodox.
(if used to avoid pregnancy)
Math is better then semantics
