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Question Title Posted By Question Date
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Withdrawal vs. Rhythm Method
WARNING!! This question and answer is of a mature nature. Parental discretion is advised.

Berto Monday, November 1, 2004

Question:

I understand that the Church’s teaching is that, for a husband, anything other than vaginal orgasm is sinful (to remain open to life), but how is the Rhythm Method any better? Whether husbands are timing orgasm outside the vagina or timing sexual activity during the wife's infertile days, events are still being manipulated to avoid pregnancy, are they not? How are we "open to life" if we engage in sex only when we know pregnancy is nearly impossible?

Question Answered by Bro. Ignatius Mary, OLSM+

Dear Berto:

Well, if the man's orgasm is non-vaginal then life is impossible. In Natural Family Planning life is still possible because the man's sperm is still deposited in the woman.

Natural Family Planning is a natural way to regulate births since it is a method of abstinence during fertile periods while remaining open to possible life at the same time.

Non-vaginal orgasm of the man removes all possibility of life completely.

It must be remembered that even Natural Family Planning (NFP) CANNOT be used just because a couple wants to avoid pregnancy. There must be a serious and non-selfish reasons to justify the use of NFP. If that justifiable reason is lacking, then the use of NFP by the couple becomes just another contraception and is sinful.

See the Couple to Couple League website for more information on Natural Family Planning

Here is the Catechism on the subject:

The fecundity of marriage

2366 Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which "is on the side of life" teaches that "it is necessary that each and every marriage act must remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life." "This particular doctrine, expounded on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act."

2367 Called to give life, spouses share in the creative power and fatherhood of God. "Married couples should regard it as their proper mission to transmit human life and to educate their children; they should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters. They will fulfill this duty with a sense of human and Christian responsibility."

2368 A particular aspect of this responsibility concerns the regulation of procreation. For just reasons, spouses may wish to space the births of their children. It is their duty to make certain that their desire is not motivated by selfishness but is in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood. Moreover, they should conform their behavior to the objective criteria of morality:

When it is a question of harmonizing married love with the responsible transmission of life, the morality of the behavior does not depend on sincere intention and evaluation of motives alone; but it must be determined by objective criteria, criteria drawn from the nature of the person and his acts, criteria that respect the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love; this is possible only if the virtue of married chastity is practiced with sincerity of heart.

2369 "By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its orientation toward man's exalted vocation to parenthood."

2370 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. In contrast, "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:

Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.... The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . . . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary


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