To stir sould: on planning families naturally & morally pt1.

The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves [union] and the transmission of life [procreation]. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the good of marriage and the future of the family (Catechism, #2363).

This evening finds me sitting at a computer trying to write while little Rachel Maria sits on my lap, "talks" to me about her day, and reaches to hit a few keys herself. She will be eighteen months old next month when her mom gives birth to our second child. I suppose it's normal for fathers to worry about their children and my thoughts turn to my youth. Memories of comments made to my parents and to us, their children, making fun of our family of ten are still easy to recall. Will my wife and children have to endure comments from unthinking relatives and friends and strangers who attribute our family's size to licentiousness rather than a desire to share our home and hearts with more children?

Parents must carry such a burden as they struggle against modern attitudes in order to raise God's children with reverence for our sexual natures. Of course, the Church has shown courage in teaching her children about the awesome gift of their sexuality but we have been so slow to understand our Mother. If we look again to her vision maybe we can be inspired to come to her defence.

Sexuality

The Second Vatican Council stated that "man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake; man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself" (Gaudium et spes, #24). This is to say that man realizes himself only in relation to others.

Ask any group of people what is most important in life and their answers will be variations on some aspect of relationship. Christians recognize that the highest call for the human person is to love. We are each called to love relationships, and this love that God calls us to is "first of all fully human, that is to say, of the senses and of the spirit at the same time" (Humanae vitae #9). In loving others we are not asked to deny who we are as spiritual and physical beings. God is the author of our existence and affirms the goodness of the body. All parts of the human person are to be put at the service of Love, who himself calls us to love (1 John 4:7-16).

Our sexuality is so much a part of who we are that we are identified primarily through it; any description of me must include that I am a husband and father. The Church's tradition, too, has proclaimed that "sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul" (Catechism #2332). Naturally then this aspect of our natures must be employed in our loving others. We see this especially in the highest expression of love, the one by which our sexual natures are most fully exercised, the marital act.

Marriage is necessarily grounded in a sexual relationship. As with any function (if we may for a moment reduce the marital act to such), its goodness can be measured by whether it attains its purpose. Purpose, or end, is plain to any intelligent mind. We notice that eating obtains the end of nutrition, with the by-product that it is also enjoyable; so too with the conjugal act:

Not only do these two goods find their source in the marital act but even in that act they are not isolated but are, rather, intimately connected. It is no small matter both to express profound union with another and to be allowed to call a new human being into eternity. Such a decision must be arrived at carefully.

Planning families

Every child is born into a society and the larger human family. The consequences of raising an individual to maturity are profound. Christians also recognize the reality of eternal life, with parents for a short time being the stewards of their children's souls. With a clear recognition of these implications it is a wonder that potential parents are not terrified into inaction!

Seeing the inherent purposes of sex it is not surprising that one expectation of marriage is that, if possible, the union will be fruitful. What is not clear is how many children the marriage will produce nor when they will arrive. The Catholic Church has always taught that these decisions are beyond the influence of any human authority, including herself, and are subject only to conformity with the natural law. Husbands and wives must make sound decisions about planning their families, and without any coercion. In doing this, planning couples should be seeking the will of the Father in prayer and balancing their decisions in both generosity and responsibility.

Responsibility requires of potential parents "that husband and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values" (Hv, #10). Save God himself, none other than a husband and a wife can truly evaluate whether what life requires of them can still be fulfilled with the birth of a new child. While there is certainly an unequal distribution of the world's resources, there is not a scarcity of them. Thus in planning their families, couples should not be led into error by opinions which purport to have evidence that the world is heading towards a crisis of overpopulation.

In discerning how to space their children it must be recognized, however, that authentic reasons may exist for families to consider delaying a birth:

In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth (Hv, #10).

While both aspects of the balance are required of couples, the current reality would seem to be that very few families are choosing to be as generous as possible. Even children of large families who themselves are thankful for their siblings are choosing to limit their own families to simple replacement level. Commenting on this decision, the Holy Father has said that:

decisions about the number of children and the sacrifices to be made for them must not be taken only with a view to adding to comfort and preserving a peaceful existence ... Parents will remind themselves that it is certainly less serious to deny their children certain comforts or material advantages than to deprive them of the presence of brothers and sisters, who could help them to grow in humanity and to realize the beauty of life at all its ages and in all its variety (John Paul II, homily, 1979).

Not only is it true that children contribute a certain intangible gift of presence to a household, but they also have an offering to make on a far wider scale. We know that part of the Christian mission is to advance the Kingdom of God in this world. One Catholic evangelist, Ralph Martin, has commented:

The world could use more Christian children. Christian parents who have their own lives in order before the Lord are well equipped to raise strong, well-adjusted children who can further God's work in the world. Society itself desperately needs more healthy, balanced children to avoid a future of amorality and lawlessness. There can never be too many children being raised in the kingdom of God as servants of Christ. (Husbands, wives, parents and children).

All this is not to say that couples should have a "five-year plan" in effect to detail births and their spacings. In making these intimate decisions, Martin says, it seems best that we understand that "God's guidance seems to come child by child, and [we can] encourage couples to make family planning decisions child by child" (Ibid).

There can be no greater calling than to bring this world to Jesus and parents are invited by God to help further this. The awesome task of planning a family in generosity and with responsibility has been given by God to husbands and wives. The Church which Jesus founded to be his body in the world has been entrusted with the mission of speaking truth from God to his children; this includes the area of marital sexual morality (and she and her ministers are duty-bound to inform consciences), but it does not include making specific decisions for individual families. That sacred right belongs only to those joined together in the Sacrament and at times it may be within God's will for them to delay the conception of a new child. When and if couples do decide to postpone, it is necessary for them to have some means to do so.

Birth control & its difficulties

Birth control has been a common choice for those seeking to avoid children. The term "birth control" is used here for those methods which artificially seek to prevent the birth of a new child. The other term, "contraception", implies that the device or chemical seeks to or does prevent conception (i.e., the union of the two sexual cells). Not all of the artificial methods prevent conception; some only eliminate birth.

There is a wide assortment of artificial methods. The most flattering statistics on their "failure" rates in preventing birth range from 0% to 8%. Certainly they can get the job done, though rarely without side-effects. They do this by a few different means. Some, like condoms, seek to prevent conception. Others, including the Pill, aim to avoid conception chemically but back up their offering with an action that aborts the child, often so young that his parents never even knew to expect him. The I.U.D. and its kin, RU-486, avoid all pretences and focus strictly on abortifacient action. For these last, birth is controlled by eliminating the one waiting to be born.

The ancient phrase corruptio optimi pessima (the worst corruption is that of the best things) makes clear why Christianity has always insisted on promoting strict sexual morality. The tradition has historically excluded birth control because the sexual act in its nature is procreative and unitive; it has the possibility of creating new life and it unites the couple who engage in it. When we separate these two aspects we are, in effect, telling God that his design for our sexuality is flawed, that we can do better. Birth control is wrong then because:

1) physically, it goes against the designed purpose of the sexual act;

2) mentally, it lies (the conjugal embrace says "I give you all of me" while birth control cripples that act of will); and

3) spiritually, it deliberately excludes God from the marriage relationship and in particular from the very act that he, as the supreme author of creation, must be a part of.

Neither can we ignore the close connection between condoning birth control and accepting abortion. As the American Protestant pro-life crusader Randall Terry put it,

The dreadful truth is that most of the excuses that women give for having their children killed through abortion are the exact same reasons we give for not having children. At its core, birth control is anti-child. [ ... ] Is it any wonder that the church cannot stop child-killing? How do we expect to defeat child-killing in the world if we cannot defeat child-rejection in our own midst? Jeremiah said if we run with footmen and grow weary, what will we do with horses?

By our apathy Christians have allowed this culture to shift from seeing pregnancy as a gift from God to seeing it as a disease to be prevented or cured.

None of this occurred without caution. In 1968, Humanae vitae gave three warnings directed at what has come to be called the contraceptive mentality.

The first concerned marital faithfulness: "Let [all] consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality." The increases in promiscuity and divorce seem to justify granting Pope Paul the title of prophet. Even Gandhi, a non-Christian, saw further down the contraceptive road when he said in 1925, "Any large use of the [artificial] methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love."

It is no wonder divorce and family breakdown are increasing at the same time as birth control has gained such a death grip on western society. "Contraception destroys family because it undermines its foundation which is selfless love [and it] is a symptom of the social disease of selfishness, even as the family is a sign of selfless love" (Fr. John Hardon, S.J.).

The second warning by Paul VI was that women would more commonly and frequently be treated as objects:

It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti- conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion (Hv, #17).

William Gairdner, in his book The War against the Family, has explained well the forces at work in the male psyche requiring discipline so as to control easily distorted sexual behaviours, though perhaps Chesteron said it best when he commented that birth controllers have eliminated birth and made control unnecessary.

Finally, Humanae vitae expressed the danger that agencies outside of the family would employ the methods coercively: "Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies" (#17). There are many examples of states requiring poor women to accept Norplant implants before allowing them to collect welfare, government agencies sterilizing women without their knowledge or against their will, and developed nations refusing economic aid to countries which will not submit their populations to comprehensive birth control programmes.

If artificial birth control so terribly violates the nature of the sexual act and couples still have an obligation to plan their families, there must be some acceptable way to do so. One imagines a loving God to have thought of something.

Wayne J. Ottenbreit is a teacher at Bishop McNally High School in Calgary. He and his wife work with the Alberta NFP (Billings) Association. Part II, on NFP, will follow in October.