Because in effect the spouses then say to each other, "I did not marry you just for sexual pleasure. I married you because I love you. You are a person, not an object. When I have sex with you, it is because I freely choose to show you my love, not because I need to satisfy an urge. This actually can strengthen the couple's sexual life. When the spouses know that they can abstain for good reasons, they also come to trust each other more, and avoid the risk of treating each other primarily as objects of sexual pleasure rather than persons.
Artificial birth control, on the other hand, gives free reign to the temptation to make pleasure the dominant element, rather than virtue. It encourages couples to think that sexual self-control is not necessary. It can encourage them to become slaves to pleasure. Both spouses need to know when the fertile days of the woman's cycle have arrived, and then decide together what to do depending on whether they are trying to avoid or achieve pregnancy.
To think that such communication and cooperation make the sexual act less pleasurable because less spontaneous is simply not true. To know with certainty what stage of the cycle one is in can increase the pleasure and spontaneity of the act, since the spouses can ignore worries about contraceptive failure or side-effects of the pill. Artificial birth control, besides introducing these worries, also puts the "contraceptive burden" on the shoulders of ONE, not both, spouses.
It makes it possible for a spouse to cut off the fertility of the act, even without the consent of the other spouse. It can introduce division into the marriage. It is a wholly positive approach to the sexual life of the spouses. It is clean, inexpensive, morally acceptable, and reliable. As with anything good, NFP can be misused, if a couple has the wrong motives.
And this is something that predates even Casti Connubii. On the one hand, you can cut down on sugar and carbs and you can exercise. You will lose weight, especially if you eat less. You know, anorexia, nervosa, or bulimia. The reason the Church denounces contraception is not because it is artificial. After all, the Church allows the use of countless artificial drugs and other technological advances that medicine can offer man.
However, these are to be used to heal dysfunction and promote the proper functioning of the body as God designed it. Contraception does the opposite: it prevents the natural functioning of the body.
Therefore, the moral difference between NFP and contraception is that contraception deliberately interrupts, sterilizes, and works against contra conception, while NFP respects the way God ordained conception to occur. In no way does NFP interrupt or sterilize an act of intercourse. NFP couples are not acting against the way God has designed fertility but are working with it.
Abortifacient effect Another major difference between NFP and contraceptives is that some birth control methods work by causing abortions. They may plan for the good of some children but often at the expense of other children, some of whom may be selected for abortion. Experience does show in fact that the trends of contraception and abortion are often in direct relation, abortion having being legalised for the purpose of recovery from failed contraception. While sexual intercourse, unlike nutrition, is unnecessary for individuals, it is a part of married love and commits married couples to the gift of fertility and to accept as many children as they can take care of.
But the Designer has also given them a second gift, the gift of infertility in each cycle, and for grave reasons they can use these infertile days to space or even indefinitely postpone the next child.
Using NFP and using contraceptives are thus different acts, separate from the intentions we may have for using them. And the act must first be judged independently of these intentions. This is because you can never do moral evil even for worthy goals or consequences.
0コメント