we are the only creatures he gets to spend an eternity loving. We are the only earthly beings built to last — so to speak. One can only guess that for God it is a joy beyond words to create creatures whom he can love eternally. This same God, who generously longs to share all of his joy with us, gives husbands and wives a taste of the particular joy that encompasses creating and loving the creation by inviting us to bring his children into the world.
Pope Francis noted that “each child is a great miracle … that changes life” (2014)! When a couple conceives a child, they are making a statement. They are saying, “This child is a living witness to the intimacy and love we share.” There is no more real way for two to become one than in the act of creating a child together.
This isn’t just a theological point. In her book The Good Marriage, secular relationship researcher Judith Wallerstein argued that when married couples close their hearts to children, their relationships take on the form of a “romantic anti-marriage” that becomes cold and isolating with time.
Rather than being antithetical to joy and intimacy, being open to life makes lovemaking a powerful, spiritual, earth-shattering, even redemptive, event. All of the books in the popular press about “spiritual sex” and “tantric lovemaking” have nothing on the sheer joy, vulnerability, spirituality, and total self-gift that accompany knowing that “tonight we are making a baby.” Likewise, there are many books that proclaim the virtues of “simultaneous orgasm” — and, to be honest, they speak a truth. But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the profound joy that occurs when a husband, a wife, and God climax together — and a life is created. How sad it is that our sexuality has been so perverted by the pagans and misrepresented by the media that such a statement might actually be shocking to many of you reading this book. But the fact remains: sex is a good that God gave to the godly. The pagans stole it from us when we weren’t looking, and it’s time we take it back (see more in Chapter 11). Through the procreative work of marriage, God gives us the grace to do just that. To paraphrase theologian Scott Hahn, God empowers us to experience a love so profound that in nine months it has to be given its own name.
Celebrating Partnership Through Creative Love
But what about those times when a couple isn’t ready to have another child?
Even when a couple has valid reasons for delaying or postponing pregnancy, appreciating the value of “openness to life” can help the couple celebrate a more intimate sexual partnership. In fact, a great help to couples wishing to celebrate this unique sexual partnership is the practice of Natural Family Planning, or NFP.
NFP and artificial contraception (the pill, condoms, etc.) exemplify two radically different mind-sets about sexuality. Contraception is isolating. It prevents a husband and wife from giving themselves totally to each other, and it is almost always one spouse’s responsibility (usually the woman’s). Contraception promotes a fear-based approach to sexuality by treating pregnancy as a disease that should be prevented — an optional by-product of pleasure. Various forms of artificial contraception (the pill, for instance) often have harmful side effects (NIH, 2015); increase women’s risk of breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer as well as a 200 percent increased risk of brain tumors (NCI, 2012; Andersen, Fiis, and Hallas, 2014); they poison the environment (Parry, 2012); they are prone to failure (up to 30 percent for condoms — CDC, 2013); they make sex habitual rather than special; and they can present physical barriers to intimacy.
By contrast, NFP promotes the union of the couple by making family planning a shared responsibility of a husband and wife. As the Church’s Letter to Families puts it, NFP makes it so that “Both [spouses] are responsible for their potential and later actual fatherhood and motherhood. The husband cannot fail to acknowledge and accept the result of a decision that has also been his own. He cannot hide behind such expressions as: ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I didn’t want it,’ or ‘You’re the one who wanted it.’ ”
NFP facilitates ongoing, prayerful communication between husbands and wives about their fertility. Studies show that NFP is as effective as hormonal contraception — over 99 percent (Hermann, Heil, and Gnoth, 2007) — and it is becoming both more practical and effective than ever because of simple-to-use electronic fertility monitors and NFP-related apps powered by sophisticated and highly accurate computer algorithms.
Interestingly enough, while many Catholics believe the Church is behind the times, the secular world is beginning to wake up to how cutting edge the Church’s views really are. More and more, secular physicians are promoting Fertility Awareness Methods of family planning — which is really just NFP without the spiritual dimension (Kunang, 2015). Secular feminists are promoting the method. As one woman put it in in an article on FAM on the popular wellness site Well+Good, “How can we consider ourselves to be the feminists we are if we don’t know the cycles of our body?” (Gallagher, 2015). Additionally, many women are beginning to wonder why they are putting so much energy into exercising, eating organic foods, avoiding pesticides, preservatives, and genetically-modified foods, while simultaneously pumping their bodies full of cancer-causing artificial hormones (Grigg-Spall, 2013).
But despite its health benefits and its effectiveness as a method of helping couples to both avoid and achieve pregnancy, NFP’s true benefits come from its constant encouragement for husbands and wives to continually talk and pray about their priorities and becoming or being parents. NFP couples must simply be more intentional — more mindful — about their sexual relationship, which facilitates greater closeness and intimacy. Couples who practice NFP constantly seek after God’s will for their lives in a way that is very difficult, if not impossible, for contracepting couples. They experience a sharing of one another and a level of communication that no contracepting couple ever could. So, even when a couple has a legitimate reason to hold off on becoming pregnant, having a more procreative view of sexuality facilitates the closer union of the husband and wife. In light of this deeper level of sharing facilitated by NFP, it is little wonder that a significant number of NFP couples report that NFP helps them experience a much more satisfying and stable marriage (VandeVusse, Hanson, and Fehring, 2004).
Celebrating Responsible Parenthood
Of course, the true joy of Catholic procreation (and this is the part you’ll never hear about in the media) is that it doesn’t stop at conception. When we Catholics say “yes” to the gift of a child, the Church reminds us that we must also be in a position to say “yes” to the forming of that child’s body, mind, and soul. Doing this requires the couple to work hard on the health and strength of their relationship with each other and with any children they may already have. The communication and partnership required by this effort is another way that a love that is open to life calls couples and families to experience deeper union with each other.
The Church refers to the process of forming persons as integral procreation. In other words, Catholics view procreation as a continuous process of ongoing formation that extends from the moment of conception to the time our children are returned to God. Procreation is the process of cooperating with God to form minds and souls, not just bodies. As St. John Paul II put it, “Fatherhood and motherhood represent a responsibility which is not simply physical but spiritual in nature” (Letter to Families; emphasis in original).
Indeed, Sirach 16:1-3 provides important support for the idea of responsible parenthood, reminding us that the blessing of children is intimately tied to our ability to raise them to love the Lord.
Do not yearn for worthless children,
or rejoice in wicked offspring.
Even if they be many, do not rejoice in them
if they do not have fear of the LORD.
Do
