This is not true. They are not compared with the same variables.
You can also find this difference for other methods of birth control.
The only problem I really have with NFP used for preventing pregnancy is that the only way you know if it hasn’t worked or if you’ve misunderstood the signs is if you turn up pregnant. Yes, I k now that people turn up pregnant using ABC too - it happens with both. THere was a pole on here about NFP and if they’d had any pregnancies - it showed that there are a lot of women & men out there that can’t or don’t choose to abstain even when they’re not wanting to get pregnant. Perhaps this is what the OP’s wife is concerned about - there are a lot of people out there (including myself) who have gotten pregnant while sticking like glue with NFP - I would bet this is one of her largest objections. The only thing I’ve found that has personally helped has been getting a machine that I can test with that keeps track. Maybe this OP’s wife is afraid that if she leaves it up to God, even if they stick to NFP she’ll get pregnant. I know that was one of my fears and realities when I used it. Of course I will also admit that I also became pregnant once while on ABC - Good Luck to the OP
O.K. I’m not trying to be nosy or anything, but perhaps if you told us why it was so damaging to your marriage - perhaps that might help if was able to tell a story of why it can be so damaging
I can see your concerns, but it still boils down to what you put your faith in. Either God’s perfect design, or the contraception industry’s highly flawed version of science. A “failure” in either case and you wind up pregnant. Only with charting, you can see why.
) They want people buying their products.I understand what you’re saying,but I know from talking to my grandmother and others that not only they but many of the people that they know would have pretty much given their right arm to not have to deal and raise so many children. Luckily my grandmother was one of the first to be able to use this kind of reproductive CHOICE. She didn’t feel that they had enough money to properly raise and give to her children everything she wanted them to have - she wanted contraception to not only make her life better and easier but also to make her children’s life better. She told me how she would see people when they came to the states shoved like anchovies in a tin into these tiny apartments. Once married, you wern’t supposed to deny your husband so it made many walking baby machines - they had no choice. On my husbands side I also heard how they didn’t want to wind up having to deal with 10 12 children which at that time was not unheard of. I’m greatful that there was contraception - perhaps it wasn’t introduced for the exact correct reasons but some of that reasons had to do with poor families not having enough to eat - the death rate was much higher. Personally, I"m glad I have the use of contraception - not to space births but because it keeps me from having to loose my reproductive organs and bleeding out. The church has given us the o.k. to use it because it isn’t used primarily to not have children. So yes, contraception did have some to do with eugenics - I have no doubt if you could go back in time you would be able to find plenty of married women who were poor who would have prefered not to be sentenced to having to be pregnant and constantly handling children. Again, once married, even if they could have used NFP, the outlook from a males perspective back then was “she’s my wife and I have the RIGHT to have sex with her when I desire…” I have read way too much about Margaret Sanger and the patrician outlooks during this time - I don’t believe many males would have wanted to give up sex in order to “space children” - luckily outlooks have changed. If you can have kids and NFP works for you than great, wonderful - but it does NOT WORK FOR EVERYONE - just like the Pill doesn’t work for everyone. I think a lot of women were greatful not to have marriage become a sentence of being barefoot and pregnant until they hit menopause. At least I know that’s how my grandmother felt about it and because of this she was able to give her children almost everything she wanted them to have.I can see your concerns, but it still boils down to what you put your faith in. Either God’s perfect design, or the contraception industry’s highly flawed version of science. A “failure” in either case and you wind up pregnant. Only with charting, you can see why.
When they were doing the research for contraception, it wasn’t women’s health they had in mind. It was just to do away with abstinence. If you read the history on the contraception movement, it really is shocking and sad. It is rooted in eugenics. The early Birth Control League was only interested in making *poor *people use contraception. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wanted to “unbreed” the poor out of existence. They wanted intelligence tests to decide if people should be granted a “reproductive license.” So my own grandmother, who spoke 3 languages fluently, was a master seamstress, and an amazing cook, would have been denied a license since she didn’t finish high school. Her own father dug ditches and graves, by hand, in Hollywoood. But her son, my dad, went on to get a master’s degree in engineering. Sanger actually had a phrase about my ethnic background. She called us, “those feeble-minded Italians with their hyper fertility.” That is not someone I trust to have my best interest at heart.
We have had people here on CAF who posted charts and said, “See, we got pregnant and we shouldn’t have!” Those of us who know how to chart are able to say, “well here is where you misread your signs.” It is simple education. We had one man who was convinced that they were the only people whose cycles made charting impossible. We explained one piece of the method that they somehow missed and suddenly, every chart made sense. They were charting day one as the first day of menses. We explained to him that in his wife’s case it wasn’t really menses but her uterine lining being so overgrown that it was shedding early. Her basal temperature drop was the actual first day of menses. It was right there in the chart.
NFP just makes more sense. It doesn’t break the marriage act and it is healthier overall. The contraception industry wants to keep people stupid. As long as people don’t know what is going on in their bodies, and they don’t want to exercise self control, they will keep buying the products. Did you know that the contraception industry has actually tried to put the withdrawl method (pull out) in the *natural *category since it has no devices?! There is almost nothing more UNnatural than coitus interuptus! But they actually have tried to call it a “natural method” to further pad their numbers! (Grumble, mumble, grumble.
As has been said by those wiser than I. NFP is not an alternative to contraception. It is an alternative to total abstinence. Contraception isn’t about preventing pregnancy. It is about doing away with self-control.
You make excellent points here. That is one reason I think there is a problem within the NFP movement. There is the fear that people will use the knowledge with a contraceptive intentions. But I say, “Let em!” I’ve written on this before. People have been trying to figure out ways to outwit Natural Law since the dawn of time. Nothing we say is going to change that.
Yes they have changed, for the worse. Everything you mention here is exactly what the contraceptive industry has chanted for years. They said that men wanted all of what you quoted. It is all a big lie! It is *contraception *that opened that door wide open. Please tell me, what reason *now *does a man have to abstain? NONE. Now he *can *have her whenever he wants. That “right” has gotten worse with contraception, not better.
But we should not be talking about what men or women feel like doing or what men or women find hard to do.
O.K> - Margaret Sanger was married to WIlliam Sanger - and architect - they seperated, but that was her only husband - so no, she wasn’t doing all of this with her husband’s money. Her huband even helped her even after they seperated - he was even jailed when she was in Europe - she received MILLIONS of letters from women wanting to know how to “limit” births - and part of the reason she began this was to stop the at home abortions that were killing people - she once saw the body of a woman whom she knew who had tried to do her own abortion and wound up dead. This is one of the main reasons she wanted birth control disseminated. I don’t agree with all the reasons she wanted birth control available but for this one particular reason so women wouldn’t die having abortions, I do agree.
(compared to the more modern methods available now)That’s absolutely not true, since then marital rape is considered to be a crime. If the wife says no and the man doesn’t listen, he can go to prison for rape. Before 1976 marital rape was not a crime in the USA, trying saying no then. Though it’s not treated as severely as stranger rape.
In my marriage it has been damaging because of how it has affected our intimacy. Things we used to be able to do like “make out” are pretty much off the table now more or less. Because all it does is create sexual frustration. And while being that we are not Catholic we have other means then intercourse to satisfy these needs for my husband they just aren;t enough. And emotionally they do nothing for me either. So basically we are left in a position where either our emotional or physical intimacy needs aren;t being met. And as a result at least for me we have grown somewhat apart.
I’ll just second everything that LittleDeb has said in reply, and also this…I do understand that this is what your grandmother has told you, but this attitude/belief isn’t in any way representative of all women of that time. My own grandma and my aunts-- from that time and some of them children of immigrants-- have told me very differently. They didn’t long for any kind of freedom from the “tyranny” of being a wife and mother, and being subject to every whim of their sex-crazed husbands.
Nothing like that at all.