Why does natural vs. artificial contraception make a difference?

[NewAugustine]

If both are for the purpose of intentionally preventing a pregnancy at the time, why does it make a difference whether one uses natural family planning or (non-abortive) artificial contraception like a condom? Aren’t both equally open to life, since God can just as easily have a condom break as He can make a women pregnant when she is in her infertile period? Hasn’t God given us the knowledge both to figure out when we are least fertile, and to figure out how to invent condoms? I am seriously seeking truth and wisdom on this.

 

[Fr.Vincent_Serpa]

Hi,

The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is the intimate, exclusive, indissoluble communion of life and love entered by man and woman at the design of the Creator for the purpose of their own good and the procreation and education of children. Sexual intercourse ratifies this marital “I do” in the mutual expression of the love of the spouses which makes possible new human lives. By deliberately preventing the possibility of transmitting life, the couple changes their “I do” at the altar to an “I do not” in the marital bed.

So-called artificial contraception is not immoral because it is artificial; but because it contracepts. Natural contraception is an oxymoron. There can be no natural contraception. Contraception, by its nature, is artificial. It is contra-conception. What we understand as contraception is that it is a deliberate act that prevents conception.

In natural family planning there is no contracepting act. In “Good News About Sex and Marriage,” Christopher West writes: “ The contracepting couple chooses to engage in intercourse, and foreseeing that their act may result in a new life, they INTENTIONALLY and WILLFULLY suppress their fertility…. Never does the couple practicing Natural Family Planning choose to impede the procreative potential of a given act of intercourse—ever. NFP is not ‘natural contraception.’ It’s not CONTRACEPTION at all.”

Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.