Should you have sex (within marriage of course) if you know you can't get pregnant?

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Hi, so my understanding has always been that you should not get married if you physically cannot have sex–for example, if you are paralyzed from the waist down–but you can even if you have been told you are infertile, because doctors can be wrong and God can work miracles. But what if you, for example, have had to get a hysterectomy? It is completely impossible to become pregnant with no uterus. Should you not get married? My best guess is no, you shouldn’t, but I wondered if anybody had some extra commentary on this.

Edit: The question originally read as “Can you get married if you know you can’t get pregnant?” Thanks to the commentary offered by some users on this very thread as well as a little guided reading of my own I now better understand that the ability to have sex is the necessary thing for a marriage to be valid, but I still wonder if anything but a Josephite marriage is a valid option for somebody who can have sex, but can’t become pregnant.
 
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On a personal level I think it would be such a sad state of affairs if two people who loved each other but knew they couldn’t have children stopped themselves from marrying and walked away to live separate lives alone.

I can’t conceive of a loving God such as ours wanting that and I’m not aware that the Catholic Church would suggest it either.
 
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I agree it would be sad but marriage and sexual union are gifts, not rights, and we have guidelines for them, as we do for all good things. That’s what gives me pause. I’ve just never seen this specific issue addressed by a Catholic authority and I’ve been keeping an eye out for some time.
 
Absolutely you can get married.
Many married couples choose to live chaste, or for some reason, are forced to live chaste.
 
Yes, marriage can be valid even if one of the spouse have a permanent sterility known before the weeding take place, as long as there is no reason to think they can be impotents.

For honesty, I think this should be said to the other part, so he can have a choice.
 
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Abbagliata said:
you should not get married if you physically cannot have sex–for example, if you are paralyzed from the waist down
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Correction: cannot get married if unable to have intercourse. This is called permanent antecedent impotence.
Abbagliata said:
you can even if you have been told you are infertile,
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Correct. Infertility is not an impediment to marriage because you can still engage in marital intercourse (just as a couple past menopause can).

The reason you have been given is wrong— it is not because “doctors can be wrong and God can work miracles”. It is because you can still have intercourse.

So, yes, a person with a hysterectomy can absolutely get married.
 
Sterility or actual (biological) inability to have children while remaining capable of having intercourse is no bar, with the exception of those rare situations when someone makes the unfortunate decision to conceal the condition, in which ase there could be invalidity because of fraud under canon 1098.

However, what people often mean by ‘can’t get pregnant’ or ‘can’t have children’ is that a pregnancy would be inadvisable and hence would be avoided, meaning the couple would be on permanent conception or at least permanent NFP.

An intention of permanent contraception would be a much more obvious invalidating factor, but also the intention to forever avoid intercourse on fertile days motivated by the inadvisibility of a pregnancy would invalidate in accordance with the ecclesial judgments and canon-law books of authority I have consulted on the subject.

In other words, impossibility of a pregnancy, about which nothing is or has to be done, is a different situation from inadvisibility of pregnancy leading to intentional avoidance of generation of offspring.

A decision to always stay on NFP, with the effect of attempting to have exactly 0 biological children, is regarded on a different level from the typical use of NFP to space apart pregnancies or mostly avoid them after a third, fourth, fifth, etc. Tribunals are of the opinion that while ‘openness’ and not the actual having of offspring is required for validity, intentional total exclusion would invalidate, even where the reason is not selfish.

This may seem harsh to some people, but there are some who through no fault of their own can’t have children and therefore can’t marry. From the existence of a legitimate reason why pregnancy should be totally avoided it doesn’t follow that a marriage with the intention of wholly avoiding the generation of offspring should necessarily be allowed to a person in that unfortunate condition. With which, by the way, I totally sympathize and have no desire of being harsh or unsympathetic or anything of the sort. However, I must relay the law as I know it.
 
1ke said:
Correction: cannot get married if unable to have intercourse. This is called permanent antecedent impotence.
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What I wrote above could be summarized as: cannot get married if forced to wholly avoid pregnancy. At this time I am not citing sources, but I have access to them, both literature and case law.
 
So chevalier, what I understand from your explanation is that a woman with no uterus shouldn’t/can’t get married, since such a condition would indeed force her to “wholly avoid pregnancy”? I understand your distinction between temporary use of NFP for legitimate reasons and intention to avoid conception forever/indefinitely, and have heard it before.

Carmelite1983, a married couple having sex with each other are not living unchastely. I assume you mean to refer to a Josephite marriage, which is a good point that had briefly occurred to me. There don’t seem to be many resources on those and how a couple should come to the decision to have one; do you know of any I could look into?

Everyone else: thank you for your contributions.
 
Let the record show that until this point the titular question had been “Can you get married if you know you can’t get pregnant?”

So I actually did just find some sources on Josephite marriage and they essentially said that the ability of both parties to partake in sexual union is a requirement. So for example, like I said, a paraplegic shouldn’t marry at all because (s)he cannot partake in sexual union. My new understanding is that somebody who has had a hysterectomy can indeed get married, and my new revised question is, is a “normal” (non-Josephite) marriage an option for him or her?
 
Abbagliata said:
So chevalier, what I understand from your explanation is that a woman with no uterus shouldn’t/can’t get married, since such a condition would indeed force her to “wholly avoid pregnancy”? I understand your distinction between temporary use of NFP for legitimate reasons and intention to avoid conception forever/indefinitely, and have heard it before.
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Yes, that’s the one; it all comes down to that distinction. ‘Positively forever’, rather than ‘indefinitely’, versus ‘for some time’, and ‘none’ versus ‘few and far between’. And the legitimacy of the reason doesn’t seem to offer a way out when the intention is ‘none, never’.

Some people argue that in those cases there is the question of what would happen if a pregnancy in fact ensued — abortion vs birth, with all the risks involved. In their own opinion the fact any child would be allowed to be born resolves this issue in favour of there being some openness, sufficient for validity. But case law and literature don’t seem to agree with that view, for all I know it’s only what some priests and laity intuitively think. The Tribunal in your diocese could have more information (cases ultimately decided by Rome would be much more valuable than cases stopping at the local level).

As for hysterectomy, that seems to be biological inability to have children while remaining capable of having intercourse, so it doesn’t seem to invalidate. The inability is an actual inability, it’s not a decision based on pros and cons like with people for whom pregnancy is possible but would result in extreme risks. One exception could be when a hysterectomy is performed without removing the ovaries so that an ectopic pregnancy is possible, which people would then want to avoid with the use of NFP, and in which case some methods of treatment would involve abortion and some not. But I’m not competent to delve into medical details much.
 
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Abbagliata said:
My new understanding is that somebody who has had a hysterectomy can indeed get married, and my new revised question is, is a “normal” (non-Josephite) marriage an option for him or her?
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Not sure why this is such a puzzle - all that is required to be “A-Okay” with the rules of The Church with regard to the questions brought up is that at the time the marriage takes place, the couple is able to put “Tab A” into “Slot B”.

The question of whether or not a pregnancy is likely or unlikely to occur doesn’t enter into it.
 
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