Our next
appeal is to men of science. These can considerably advance the welfare of
marriage and the family and also peace of conscience, if by pooling their
efforts they strive to elucidate more thoroughly the conditions favorable to a
proper regulation of births. It is supremely desirable, and this was also the
mind of Pius XII, that medical science should by the study of natural rhythms
succeed in determining a sufficiently secure basis for the chaste limitation of
offspring.
In this
way scientists, especially those who are Catholics, will by their research
establish the truth of the Church's claim that "there can be no
contradiction between two divine laws—that which governs the transmitting of
life and that which governs the fostering of married love."
Pope
Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 24
Reflection – It was just as HV was being published
that two doctors in Australia, John and Evelyn Billings, were responding in
advance to this appeal from the Pope to men (and women) of science. Studying
the fertility cycles of women, they developed a method, not so much of
contraception, but of highly accurate tracking of the monthly ovulation cycle
through certain manifestations that women could be taught to observe.
The Billings Ovulation Method developed by them has
proven itself to be an invaluable tool empowering millions of married couples
to know their own patterns of fertility and infertility and rationally plan
their families accordingly. Used properly as a means of avoiding pregnancy, it
has an effectiveness rate of around 97%, comparable to the birth control pill.
Many will
dismiss NFP as ‘the rhythm method’ and trot out the hoary old joke about ‘What
do you call women who use the rhythm method? Mothers.’ It should be hoary old joke
indeed, since to conflate NFP with the calendar rhythm method is rather like
discussing the gas mileage of cars by conflating together Hummers and Priuses,
or discussing the survival rates of heart surgery by combining statistics from
the 1940s to the present.
In other
words, science has indeed marched on, and the Billings and other modern methods
of NFP are ‘not your grandfather’s NFP’, to paraphrase the old car commercial.
I find it a bit darkly amusing that people who claim the mantle of modernity and
scientific rationality are about 50 years behind the times on this question and
resolutely resist updating their knowledge.
People do
sometimes quote a 25% failure rate for Billings (in the sense that ‘getting
pregnant’ is counted as failure, which is in my view a problematic
statement—few of us would care to be told that our existence was a ‘failure’ by
our parents), but this number is misleading. It would appear (from my reading
on the subject) that this reflects either poor teaching or use of the method,
decisions to ignore the information re fertility (which is all NFP gives you)
and have intercourse during the fertile period, or an actual choice by the
couple to go ahead and achieve pregnancy using that information.
NFP is not,
really, a contraceptive method, but a method of acquiring knowledge, the woman’s
knowledge about her own body and its workings, the couple’s knowledge about
their mutual fertility. It is interesting that, under the mantle of supposed ‘feminism’,
many would choose to deprive the woman of this knowledge, keep the poor thing
in ignorance about her own body, and instead hand her a bunch of pills or
devices that have high levels of health risks and unpleasant side effects, or
if they don’t, probably don’t work all that well, since it is the normal healthy state for a woman's body to be fertile (but if the contraception fails, abortion is
always offered as a back-up plan) and can make it difficult to achieve
pregnancy down the line.
Contraception
essentially treats fertility as a disease and women’s bodies as if they are
defective. Scientists (usually male) need to reconfigure the body of the woman
to fix her, since she is broken and inferior, even if by making her sterile
they cause her to have all sorts of other health issues.
NFP, promoted
by the Catholic Church among others, treats the woman as if she is a rational
agent capable of understanding herself and her physicality and capable of
making choices to plan her life based on the actual way her body works and its
inherent rhythms.
Uhh… remind me
of who the feminists in this picture are, again?