Natural Family Planning is Antilife

David Martin | The Daily Knight

Natural Family Planning (NFP) has become popular in today’s Catholic instruction on marriage and family. Natural Family Planning is when couples deliberately arrange their marital activity around the woman’s monthly cycle to avoid pregnancy from occurring.

Hence, NFP is nothing more than contraception, i.e., the attempt to work against conception. It’s Planned Parenthood rubbish where couples and not God take control of their marriage to suit their own selfish pursuits – pursuits of career, finances, pleasure, acclaim, etc. Though the method is different than that used by most women today (the pill), the intention is the same.  As they say, “It’s the thought that counts.” As with those who use the pill, the intention of NFP couples is to block God from working through their marriage.

This in turn is what brings all the discord and friction upon married couples since it invites the devil to nest among them. In the Bible, St. Raphael the Archangel tells young Tobias:

“I will shew thee who they are, over whom the devil can prevail. For they who in such manner receive matrimony, as to shut out God from themselves, and from their mind, and to give themselves to their lust, as the horse and mule, which have no understanding, over them the devil hath power.” (Tobias 6:16) 

Contraception a Grave Sin

Contraception is against Church teaching. it is a mortal sin and one that fosters the spirit of pride and rebellion among women. Unfortunately, antilife feminists have infiltrated the Church and have recruited and trained unassuming women to advance this NFP program of “planning” the family, which couples do under the illusion of being traditional, family minded Catholics.  How mistaken they are. Without realizing it, they’ve blindly adopted Planned Parenthood terminology into their lives!

The late Fatima expert Fr. Nicholas Gruner made it clear that Natural Family Planning is a grave sin on the grounds that it is antilife.

“To use the natural rhythms of a woman’s body to avoid having children altogether is always wrong because if you did that with the intent of never having children your marriage isn’t valid in the first place.”

Fr. Gruner cites Pope Pius XI as saying that each and every act of contraception, whether it’s the pill or otherwise, is a mortal sin.

Humanae Vitae Misconstrued

Contrary to the claims of many, Pope Paul VI in his Humanae Vitae never proposed or condoned the idea that married couples habitually use the “rhythm method” to avoid pregnancy. As an alternative to abstinence or using artificial birth control, the pope simply said that in the case of couples who earnestly want to have children but who at a certain point in time are seriously ill or in danger of collapse, they do have access to the “rhythm method” as a temporary means of getting them through a difficult period, but only on condition that their plan is to have children soon after and on a regular basis. He was never suggesting that couples use marriage to ‘duck and hide’ from God. His encyclical was all about using marriage for procreation and on God’s terms.

Today’s Catholics would do well to review the past and to note that never once did any saint or angelic doctor of the Church promote NFP as a way of life. Hence if they didn’t promote it neither should we.