There is an article online by Christopher Ferrara attacking NFP as a neo-liberal Catholic practice. He explains why it is still wrong and seems to make fun of NFP just as pro-contraception people would.
What do you guys think?
geocities.com/maryskey/myst_charting.html
Mr Ferrara has a good point.
Clearly, the ideal is that couples should have sexual intercourse if the want children, and no if they don’t. NFP carries with it the risk of unwanted or unplanned children. Admittedly in a Catholic home most of these will be quickly accepted, but it is still not the best start.
Let’s use an analogy. I work on the amyloid fibres which are present in Alzheimer’s disease. Now some scientists beleive that these fibres may be infectious, and seed Alzheimer’s disease i healthy people. Others think that there is no danger. Clearly they are not extremely infectious, people who have been exposed to brain tissue from Alzheimer’s pateints don’t come down the next week.
Since we don’t know, the only prudent laboratory practise is to treat the material as dagerous. However you can have a sensible arguement about whether it should be treated as extremely dangerous or moderately dangerous. If we treated everything that could conceivably pose a risk with the highest priority it would be very expensive, and actually dilute safety, as people would take shortcuts with genuinely high-risk material.
Now let’s say that the lab manager takes the decision to categorise the material as “extremely dangerous”. Now anyone using “moderately dangerous” procedures can, quite rightly, be banned from working in that lab again. Despite that fact that next week the policy might change.
Similarly with contraception. We know that contraception is not an unmitigated good, but the philosophical position of the church is quite fluid. We haven’t quite firmed up on why we don’t like it, we are not sure whether overpopulation changes the situation. However pastoral teaching has to be clear, just as you have to have clear laboratory safety procedures.
The NFP OK, condoms bad teaching is very provisional, and there are problems with it. Mr Ferrara is right to point out the inconsistencies, and some of the mystical aspects of NFP he identifies are the results of misguided priests trying to defend the current teaching, by giving it a status it doesn’t have.
The important point is that contraception is not the technical fix to the problem of excess fertility that the world thinks it is. It causes psychological problems for couples who use it. However unrestricted population growth will bring worse problems, and abstinence is maybe unrealistic. There are no easy answers, but NFP is a good compromise. It should be treated as no more than that.
