Do you need a reason to morally practice NFP or Naturally Family Planning? My post about the sinfulness of contraception and sterilization (Read: 6 Reasons Why Contraception is Sinful) stirred up some comments about natural family planning (NFP). Some have claimed that NFP is abused just as much as artificial contraception. So today we’ll look at NFP and the Catholic Church’s serious reasons or just causes for NFP.

In this post we’ll look at the teaching of Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI on the reasons for NFP. I’ll also share some personal thoughts about it all.

Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a popular contemporary term for “periodic continence.” NFP works by observing the cycles of a wife’s fertility (charting oral temperatures, measuring cycle length, and journaling interior fertility signs), and then avoiding the nuptial embrace during her times of fertility so as to avoid pregnancy. In NFP, the husband and wife abstain from the nuptial embrace altogether during the time of the wife’s monthly fertility (usually 7-12 days).

The Church allows married couples to practice periodic continence only for what the church calls “serious” or “just” reasons. These reasons were listed by Pope Pius XII in his “Address to the Italian Catholic Union of Midwives” from 1951. Granted, a popes address to “Italian midwives” is low on the the pole when it comes to magisterial statements. It’s not a universal statement. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to begin our investigation here.

Pope Pius XII NFP Serious List (1951)

Pope Pius XII’s list from his “Address to the Italian Catholic Union of Midwives” in 1951:

Serious motives, such as those which not rarely arise from medical, eugenic, economic and social so-called “indications,” may exempt husband and wife from the obligatory, positive debt for a long period or even for the entire period of matrimonial life.”

Pope Pius XII gives us these four reasons:

1. Medical reasons
2. Eugenic reasons
3. Economic reasons
4. Social “indicator” reasons

Pope Paul VI NFP Serious List (1968)

Seventeen years later, the serious reasons (seriis causis) were repeated by Pope Paul VI in his groundbreaking encyclical Humanae Vitae.

With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts (seriis causis moralibusque praeceptis observatis), decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.” (Humanae Vitae, 10).

Here Pope Paul VI mentions “serious reasons” (seriis causis) with four kinds of conditions:

1. Physical conditions
2. Economic conditions
3. Psychological conditions
4. Social conditions

It seems that Pope Paul VI has in mind the four reasons listed by Pope Pius XII with the additional help of “psychological” and the omission of “eugenic.” However, we can discern that medical, eugenic, and psychological belong to the one “medical” genus of reason/condition/cause.

I think we can simplify the lists of both pontiffs without doing injustice to either.

NFP Serious Reasons List: Simplified and Harmonized

1. Physical conditions (including “Medical,” “Psychological,” and “Eugenic”)
2. Economic conditions
3. Social conditions

Note that NFP or “periodic continence” in itself is morally neutral since observing a woman’s cycle and remaining continent are morally neutral. Therefore, NFP is not intrinsically evil. Artificial contraception (condoms, the pill, interuptus) are intrinsically evil because they directly intervene in the natural process. Artificial contraception obstructs the natural act either through devices, chemicals, or direction intervention. So then, NFP can be used when there is a proper “serious” circumstance, and the Holy Father provides four such circumstances. Let’s go through these four grave reasons.

1. Physical (Medical, Psychological, and Eugenic) Medical reasons for NFP would prudently weigh whether the mother’s life is in jeopardy or whether a circumstance would endanger the newly conceived child’s life (eg, the mother is going through chemotherapy or other treatment that would damage or kill a newly conceived baby). In regard to serious medical reasons, Pope Paul VI, in Humanae Vitae n. 16, also spoke of “reasonable grounds for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife.”

The Catholic Church recognizes that psychological problems are serious. This might include not only the mother’s mental health, but also the father’s mental health. If either parent is depressed, schizophrenic, suicidal, etc. parents should prayerfully delay pregnancy “with due respect to moral precepts.” For more on “Catholic parent mental break down,” please check out my post on GBS: George Bailey Syndrome.

With regard to what Pius XII calls “eugenics,” if the couple would pass on dangerous birth defects or perhaps has a history of serial miscarriages, then parents might prayerfully delay pregnancy “with due respect to moral precepts.” Jennifer Fulwiler has an excellent post on NFP and her own personal experience with NFP, medical problems, her babies, and “hope vs. risk.”

2. Economic (Poverty and Debt) Economic reasons touch on whether the married couple is too poor to provide for a new child. Obviously, an economic “serious reason” does not to the inability to pay for fishing boats, fancy prep schools, a new hunting rifle, or Lilly Pulitzer diaper bags. We’re talking about falling below the poverty line within one’s culture. There is no point in comparing poverty in one nation to poverty in another. It depends on where you live. A family earning $20,000 in the United States would be “rich” in Indonesia – but they don’t live in Indonesia. They live in America! American parents must buy minivans, pay the mortgage, buy clothes, and provide religious education in America at American prices. So we shouldn’t say, “Even poor Americans are richer than central Africans, therefore, poor Americans can’t have recourse to NFP.

If a married couple are subsisting on government assistance, then they should delay pregnancy “with due respect to moral precepts.” There is one element missing from today’s discussion on Catholic marriage and family and that is debt.

Financial debt is a grave evil. The Bible often speaks of the danger of personal debt: