Few know about Margaret Sanger and how she pushed the contraceptive movement as part of a eugenics program. Many Amercans do mistakenly think it’s about “choice” and “not telling women with their bodies.” Words are twisted and manipulated. Most Americans do not notice that the contraceptive movement tries to tell women what to do with their bodies.
Sorry, nope, don’t see it. Forced sterilization would be “denying a family the right to have more children”. A policy such as China’s that punishes people for having more than one child could be seen as “denying a family the right to have more children”. Teaching about reliable contraception methods (including NFP) as an option for spacing or timing one’s pregnancies (or preventing them) is not a case of “denying a family the right to have more children” or “reproductive oppression”.
No-one’s objecting to “teaching about methods” that’s not what the article is about. (And NFP is not “contraception”). Western “donors” force contraception, sterilisation and/or abortion (CSA) on governments and people in many countries through tactics which are barely short of the brute force used in China. How would you feel if you were told that if you do not accept the proffered CSA you and your children will be refused basic health care, education, employment etc? Or if you were in the government of a poor country and were told you must accept the CSA program imposed by Western countries or else your country would be subject to trade boycotts, withholding of financial assistance for genuine health needs etc.? If you walked miles to a clinic when you had a terrible disease easily treatable with cheap medicines, only to be told, “sorry we don’t have medicine for that, but here’s some free condoms and birth control pills, and we’ll give you a free abortion any time you want”?
NFP is most certainly just as much a method of contraception as any other reversible method such as birth control pills, etc. It is used for exactly the same reason (to avoid becoming pregnant at a specific time while still allowing the couple to engage in intercourse), it simply works by a different mechanism, one that is acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church.
I don’t see any claim of any of those things in the article cited, nothing close. Would you care to provide sources for those claims?
Ticked off that there was not the health care I needed, but not “denied the right to have more children” or “reproductively oppressed”. Condoms and birth control pills can easily be thrown away if the person does not want to use them, or even sold to someone who does want them. They are not grabbing women out of their homes to take them for sterilization or abortion.
Also, condoms are one of the easier, least expensive ways to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, one of the “real diseases” mentioned in the article by Ghanaians, not necessarily just for birth control. Fighting the spread of and treating sexually transmitted diseases falls under most people’s definition of “reproductive health services”, as do things like mammograms, prenatal care, gynecological exams, etc.
Health programs for some of these poor countries often spend considerable funds and energy attempting to spread contraception and abortion. Even if they give away condoms and birth control pills “for free”, this article points out that the women in these countries identify they have medical needs that are not adequately addressed, yet some people want to spend limited health care funds on contraception and abortion.
You clearly have not the first idea what NFP is. It most certainly does not allow anyone “to avoid becoming pregnant at a specific time while still allowing the couple to engage in intercourse”. It merely allows couples to choose which specific times they will engage in intercourse in order to decrease or increase the likelihood that they will have a baby. It makes no difference at all to whether intercourse at a specific time will result in a baby, nor does anyone intend it to, if they are using NFP as directed.
If you look on the same site you will find plenty of reliable evidence of all the above.
Hear, hear, at least we agree on that. However at least the missionaries are only spending their own denomination’s money. Taxpayers in “donor” and “recipient” countries are paying for the contraception, sterilisation and abortion programs which are not asked for, not needed and harmful to the health of the recipient countries’ citizens.
And that is a problem. It is not, however, “denying people the right to have children”.
Agreed.
So detail for me exactly the forms that this “oppression” takes and what people try to do to you. In what way have they tried to deny you the right to have children?
Did you actually read what you just wrote? If one is “choosing which specific times they will engage in intercourse in order to decrease or increase the likelihood that they will have a baby”, what in the world are they doing other than “intending whether intercourse at a specific time will result in a baby”?
I would prefer to see your specific sources, thanks.
That is the pernicious wisdom of “prevention”.
It’s God alone who decides whether a specific act of intercourse at a specific time will result in a baby, and the couple using NFP do not attempt to influence this at all.
No act of intercourse is ever “absolutely” least likely to end in conception. At some times it is more likely than others, At some times it is a little likely, at some times it is a little more likely. It isentirely up to the couple whether they decide to have intercourse at the 'least likely" time only, at “more likely” times
It’s a moral issue, not a theological one.
I do not see how anyone can say that a couple does not engage in a methodical tracking of a woman’s fertility cycle and choose their times of intercourse based on that cycle in order to “influence whether a specific act of intercourse at a specific time will result in a baby”. They are doing their human best to either make it as likely as they can that a baby will result or as unlikely as they can that a baby will result.
Sorry, I see it simply as a matter of semantics. All forms of birth control are means of people who believe themselves to be fertile seeking to engage in sexual relations while doing their best to prevent or avoid conception as a result of those relations. It is the mechanisms that differ (and I fully acknowledge that the choice of mechanism is important), not the intent. The intent is “We don’t want to get pregnant right now,” the way in which that goal is pursued is the difference.
First, I want to let you know that I used contraception for numerous years. Like most other Americans, I believed the “family planning” agenda. I remember well the kind of comments made behind the back of people who had large families and those comments of themselves served as a subtle yet strong form of “reproductive oppression” via peer pressure.