NFP if no serious reason to avoid pregnancy exists?

[LotusCarsLtd]

I’ve always seen discussions surrounding when it’s licit to use NFP to avoid pregnancy. But what happens if you don’t have a serious reason to avoid pregnancy any more? Say you’re in a good way financially, you have plenty of space between your previous pregnancy, etc. What would you do then? Would you basically be in a situation where if you feel the desire to have sex, then it would be better to enjoy the act even if it’s knowingly happening during a fertile period?

Maybe no such situation truly exists, but if there are situations where a couple doesn’t have a serious reason to abstain, I’m curious what they do.

 

[gferrer]

I’ve always seen discussions surrounding when it’s licit to use NFP to avoid pregnancy. But what happens if you don’t have a serious reason to avoid pregnancy any more? Say you’re in a good way financially, you have plenty of space between your previous pregnancy, etc. What would you do then? Would you basically be in a situation where if you feel the desire to have sex, then it would be better to enjoy the act even if it’s knowingly happening during a fertile period?

Maybe no such situation truly exists, but if there are situations where a couple doesn’t have a serious reason to abstain, I’m curious what they do.

In our marriage, I’d say the short answer is yes. We have found that abstaining is so undesirable that we only do so for a serious reason. NFP, in effect, has guided us in the right direction.

 

[Iheartcoffee]

Since NFP can be used to try or to avoid a pregnancy, charting is something that can be done no matter where you fall in that continuum. The knowledge of whether or not you are fertile is just that, knowledge. How you use it is up to you.

Not everyone falls into the neat and tidy little categories of “trying to avoid” or “trying to conceive”. There is a lot of gray area in between. In my opinion, it is best to chart no matter what and then use the info to help you decide how liberal or how conservative you need to be with your usage of the info on that chart. I suggest charting continuously just because you never know what lies ahead. If a serious reason to avoid (or conceive-perhaps you decide you want a baby ASAP) comes along, the last thing you want to do is to be figuring out your charting and patterns all over again.

For instance, within a few months of getting married, my husband and I found ourselves with a very sudden and VERY serious reason to avoid. I was matched to donate stem cells to a man with cancer. It is not safe to donate stem cells while pregnant, so in order to be available to donate I needed to avoid getting pregnant until after a final decision was made about his need for a donation. Since we had been charting all along it was simple to immediately implement very conservative interpretations of the charts and avoid pregnancy. Had we not been charting all along I am not sure we would have been able to avoid pregnancy so well during that time. A man’s life potentially hung on whether or not we successfully avoided pregnancy because I was his match. That’s a pretty big deal. Ultimately, his doctor decided to pursue a different course of treatment, but the fact that I was available should my stem cells be needed was pretty awesome. At the very least I gave him and his doctor another treatment option to consider.