Natural Family Planning

When a man and woman enter into marriage they establish a covenant with one another in which they give themselves freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully as noted in the questions of consent on the day of the wedding: Have you come here to enter into marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly? Are you prepared, as you follow the path of marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live? Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?

The couple's conjugal embrace is a physical expression of their wedding vows, which potentially leads to new life if God so wills. The conjugal embrace has a two-fold purpose: union and procreation. God has designed sex as a good which deepens the bond of the spouses and can naturally lead to the creation of new human life during a woman's fertile period. The couple thus become co-creators with God of a new life called to dwell with Him for eternity in heaven. Couples, therefore, are called to an openness to life that honors their human dignity and the sexual act, which fulfills their wedding vows and recognizes God as the author and sustainer of all human life. To willfully render the sexual act sterile through an act of contraception dismisses all of these realities. 

Throughout Christian history, the faithful, whether Catholic or Protestant, recognized contraceptives as a denial of the dignity of the human person and the sexual embrace. Only as recent as 1930 did some Protestant expessions of faith begin to turn from this truth. The Church reiterates it's perennial fidelity to God's design for man and woman in the Catechism, "'every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible' is intrinsically evil" (CCC 2370). Contraceptive use, therefore, is objectively and gravely sinful matter.

Desiring to propose the truth, beauty, and goodness of married life and the joy of the Gospel to couples, the Church invites all those in the marital state of life to consider natural family planning to assist in achieving pregnancy, or for just reasons, to avoid pregnancy in a moral and ethical manner. "Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom" (CCC 2370). For a further detailed understanding of why the Church teaches and proposes this beautiful truth of human love and life, please see the Resources section below.