Morality

Couples choose to practice Natural Family Planning for a variety of reasons. Important to many people is the issue of morality. 

The services of the League are open to all regardless of religious affiliation or conviction, but that doesn’t mean that we teach NFP without moral and religious convictions.

First, we believe that God is the Author of nature; He is the one who put together in the marriage act what we call "making love" and "making babies." It is God who in His providence has allowed us to learn in the late 20th century about woman’s alternating fertility and infertility — and about Natural Family Planning — at the same time that other medical advances greatly increased the population survival rate. NFP allows couples to prudently regulate births without recourse to unnatural, immoral methods of birth control that interfere with the way God designed our fertility.

As astonishing as this statement may seem, throughout history natural methods have never been less effective than the unnatural, non-surgical methods. (Moral methods may not be as convenient, and they do require self-control, but that is a wonderful and rewarding virtue to acquire, as many NFP couples will attest.) In the 1930s the Ogino-Knaus Rhythm Method of NFP was as effective as the most effective "new" contraceptive barrier methods. In the 1960s, when the Pill launched the Sexual Revolution, the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP (as taught by CCL today) was as effective as the Pill.

Religious and moral convictions guide anyone’s decisions about sexual behavior. We believe that when people are fully informed about the advantages of NFP they will see that this method best agrees with their convictions as well as their practical desires for happier marriages and healthier lives.

NFP does not mean "Not for Protestants." You don’t have to be Catholic to have strong convictions that it is wrong to use unnatural methods of birth control.  "Such 'providentialists' should at least learn the rules for ecological breastfeeding, God's own way of spacing babies."  For a better understanding of the moral issue of birth control and to find out the true position of the Catholic Church on this matter, please see Church Teachings on NFP. and especially the full text of Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (On Human Life).