Many people have trouble distinguishing between natural family planning (NFP) and contraception. Catholic moral teaching has always been clear on the subject, but this clarity eludes many Catholics. Since both involve not having children, they seem as if they were exactly the same act for many people. This is also true of many health care providers.
The essential evil of contraception and good of natural family planning becomes clearer if one evaluates them using the traditional three moral determinants, which have their origin in St. Thomas Aquinas. The Church has used these for centuries in an authoritative manner. The most recent example is in both the encyclical of John Paul II, Veritatis splendor and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The three moral determinants are the object, intention, and circumstances. The object is what the act is about, its matter. This is determined in relationship to reason.
In examining the reason for marriage, the Church has accepted the fact that there are three characteristics which distinguish the love of marriage from other human loves. These are: fidelity, fecundity, and friendship. These three characteristics turn around the act by which life is brought forth.
This is a physical act, but because it is performed by people with a spiritual soul and has as its purpose the generation of a human being, body and spiritual soul, there are special goods involved. The one is a special love which a human father and mother experience. This involves the most intense giving and receiving of self which can occur in an earthly relationship.
The friendship which must accompany this must be life-long and cannot be ended except by death. The reason for this is the fact that the act which expresses this union is directly related to the other good which is the bringing forth of human life. For a person to deny either of these relationships is contrary to reason. In other words, it is evil.
Contraception is the attempt to deny precisely all these relationships by robbing the relationship of its relationship to human life. This results in avoiding the responsibilities of love in this special relationship and compromises both the fidelity necessary to preserve it and the freedom of friendship involved. The reason is because both the parents and the prospective child cannot be reduced merely to something material or pleasurable because of the spiritual nature of the soul.
The soul must be directly created by God, and so Aristotle maintained in his Politics that there was “something divine in human seed” because of its final purpose as a physical being, the generation of the human soul. Actions of sexual union done by couples which deny procreation are evil. They are so by their very object. Hence, these acts are intrinsically and always evil.
No circumstance, consequence or intention can make such an act good. All three of the moral determinants must be good for an action to be good. A defect in one makes it evil, and an act of contraception by artificial device of some kind makes the action automatically evil. This would include things like using a condom to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The intention and circumstance may be good there, but the action is evil.
The Creator has rights in the physical act because physical matter is not sufficient to create the human soul. A couple who practices NFP is respecting those rights because they are controlling themselves according to the natural infertility the Creator himself has placed in this action. They are therefore respecting the order of reason.
Moreover, NFP involves self-control and unites the person in his reason with the control of the act he is performing. So it is in object good and completely different from contraception.
In addition to the object, a moral action is also judged by the circumstances in which it is found because moral actions are not carried on in the abstract. If a couple are free to have a child they should.
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The Church says that there must be “grave reasons” to space births in marriage apart from abstinence. These would be, for example, if the woman were told a pregnancy might threaten her life or preclude her child being brought to term. The circumstances must also be good then for an act of NFP to be good. Just having a bigger house or better vacations would not be sufficient reason to space births.
The final moral determinant is the intention which is the personal reason the couple have for practicing NFP. This must be based on the personal affirmation of the other and on temperance.
In other words, though one may certainly intend pleasure in a conjugal act, this cannot be the primary reason. If the intention is only contraceptive, for example, to merely have pleasure at the expense of responsible parenthood, NFP would be an evil action from intention.
So it is important for Catholics to realize that though NFP and contraception both involve a couple spacing the number of children they have, they differ completely in moral object. This is because one respects the order of reason and the other does not. However, evil intention or frivolous circumstances could still preclude a person morally practicing NFP because it could reduce a morally good act to an act of contraception.