What's the big difference between Natural Family Planning (NFP) and contraception?
Morality-Suppose that a married couple is using contraceptives for the same reason another couple is practicing NFP. Both couples already have children and hope to have more. But for good reasons they need to space the next birth by a couple of years. Both have the intent to regulate births, and responsible parenthood allows couples not to have more children than they can care for. However, the good intent of a couple is not sufficient to determine the morality of their act. For example, if two women wanted to avoid becoming overweight, one might go on a diet, and the other might binge and purge (bulimia). Both may stay slim, but one exercises the virtue of temperance, while the other succumbs to gluttony and unnatural, unhealthy behavior.
Similarly, the Church’s condemnation of contraception does not imply that the couple has bad intentions but that they are using a means that is immoral. Married couples are free to have intercourse (or to agree to abstain from it) on any given day, regardless of the wife’s fertility. But when they do join as one flesh, they must not frustrate the purpose God designed that act to have. It is God alone who has the power to create an immortal soul as a result of the marital act, and to contracept is to say that God’s presence is not desired. Clearly then, a couple abstaining from sex for a just reason cannot be compared to a couple who sterilize their acts of lovemaking in order to enjoy the pleasure of the marital act apart from God’s design.
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. For example, the birth control pill, the morning-after pill, the patch, the intrauterine device (IUD), and Depo-Provera (the shot) sometimes work by preventing a newly conceived child from attaching to the uterus. This causes a first trimester abortion to occur—without the mother even knowing it.
Side effects-All contraceptives have potential adverse side effects, most of which affect the woman. They may include a heightened risk of breast cancer, a greater risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, migraine headaches, high blood pressure, fatal blood clots, increased fetal abnormalities, and toxic shock syndrome.
Fruits of NFP-Couples who use NFP have a divorce rate of 1 to 3 percent. In one study there were zero divorces out of fourteen hundred NFP couples. Keep in mind that more than half of all marriages end in divorce. The striking correlation between NFP and strong marriages is an important indication of the close relationship between NFP and the way God designed marriage and sex to work.
Also, NFP offers benefits that contraceptives cannot. Couples using NFP have an understanding of how to time intercourse to achieve pregnancy. Because they track the woman's fertility cycles so closely, they'll also become aware of fertility related health problems that would be masked under contraception.
NFP also heightens communication between spouses and places the decision of spacing children upon the couple, not upon a failed contraception.
~This is the last of this series~