This is a controversial topic in Catholic circles, and we try to treat the topic fairly and as fully as we can. Because it touches on questions of life and love and marriage and children and decisions in the past as well as decisions in the present and future, we ask that you listen with an open mind and heart.
Catholic couples sometimes approach natural family planning (NFP) with an odd mindset, almost like they've got a solution and now are looking for a problem to justify using it. Another unfortunate mindset in approaching NFP is to see it as a solution to a problem that they're not willing to admit to having, for fear that people might judge them. There are issues to both sides, and we hope we've been able to set out a third mindset, in which marriage is fundamentally for the procreation and education of children as well as the sanctification of the couple. Natural family planning, or the deliberate use of infertile periods in a woman's cycle for the marital act and deliberate exclusion of the fertile periods in order to avoid pregnancy, figures into that vision as a legitimate means to allow for the addressing of the serious reasons that prompted the need to avoid another pregnancy. Something is legitimately wrong, and needs to be addressed, for NFP to make sense in this context, otherwise the wedding vows don't make much sense.
Let us know your thoughts by emailing us at hello@ouroutpost.org!
Hopefully you've been able to listen to the "Charting Cycles of Fertility" and "Humanae Vitae" episodes, because this builds on them! We think you can listen to this episode on its own, but if we're wrong, you'll want to go back to the last two episodes!
As always,
