I’m an Orthodox Christian and have been thinking about the connection between NFP and barrier forms of contraception recently. I am persuaded that the ancient Christian teaching is that marriage and sexuality are geared primarily for procreation and only secondarily for the union of the spouses. This plan of God is realized through the primary and secondary ends of the conjugal act applying to the act at all times and in the same order. Because of this, the conjugal act is *always *objectively ordered toward its primary and secondary ends, viz., procreation and the union of the couple. This is true regardless of whether subjective issues outside the couple’s control keep either procreation or union from occurring in the conjugal act. Since procreation is written into the nature of every conjugal act, any deliberate action/behavior taken by the couple to prevent conception from occurring could only be defined as an attempt to play God and remove what he, himself, established as part of the nature of conjugal union (an action otherwise known as contraception). This would make NFP equal to barrier methods of contraception. Under this belief, barrier methods of contraception would differ from NFP only in that they delay the removal of the act’s procreative nature a little longer. Using an analogy to abortion, this belief would make the difference between NFP and barrier methods equivalent to the difference between keeping an embryo from implanting itself in the womb and removing it from the womb once it’s there – since in both cases a conceived life must never be deliberately ended, both forms of removing the embryo are abortion. Likewise, since under the traditional conception of the nature of the conjugal act, the procreative aspect of the conjugal act always exists and must not be deliberately removed, both forms of removing this procreative potential (either by preventing it from occurring or removing its occurrence was there) would be equal violations of the teaching.
I believe that the Roman Catholic Church traditionally taught this belief of the primary and secondary ends of the conjugal act existing in their divinely established order in every conjugal act. However, with *Humane Vitae *and the acceptance of NFP, the connection between procreation and the conjugal act was subtly changed. The current Roman Catholic teaching is that a marital act is only objectively procreative if it naturally finds itself so. Under this new definition, keeping the conjugal act from ever being naturally procreative can be accepted in certain cases, whereas barrier methods of contraception, which remove the act’s natural procreativity, are still rejected. However, under the traditional belief that the primary and secondary ends of the conjugal act apply at all times, NFP couldn’t be accepted because it would entail deliberately removing the objective primary end of sexuality placed into the nature of the act by God, himself.
I’ve wanted to ask a traditional Roman Catholic who rejects NFP about these opinions. I’m glad that I saw your post. Do you think these observations are correct?
God bless,
Adam
