According to the Natural Family Planning website, about one out of one hundred Catholic couples of childbearing age practice NFP. That suggests to me that at every Mass with a good-sized congregation there are two or three couples who practice NFP. If you are one of them, I'd love it if you'd share your story in this blog. Meanwhile, I'm resorting to the printed word. In Rome Sweet Home, the story of their gradual conversion to Catholicism, Scott and Kimberly Hahn recount their decision to foreswear artificial birth control--first to use NFP and ultimately to submit to God's will by letting nature take its course. (I'd love to hear from any of you who've done likewise.)
Kimberly and Scott Hahn met at a
Christian college and married following graduation in 1979. In pre-marital counseling, the young couple
was asked what birth control they would use.
Planning a family and spacing children was seen by their mentors and
their peers as "reasonable and responsible."
Kimberley didn’t know any married friends who didn’t practice birth
control.
Scott began a three-year Master of Divinity program at Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary; the next year Kimberley enrolled in a two-year Master of
Arts in Theology program in the same seminary.
Staunch Evangelicals, they describe themselves as
anti-Catholic at this point in their faith journeys. In a course on Christian ethics, Kimberly’s
involvement in the pro-life movement led her to join a small group studying
contraception. When one of the members
dismissed the Catholic viewpoint as unworthy of consideration because for one
thing the Pope wasn’t married and secondly the Catholic Church merely wanted to
build up its numbers, Kimberly said she thought there must be more to it than
that and decided to make the Catholic position her focus.
She studied Humanae Vitae and
other documents of the Catholic Church.
She reread Scripture passages in light of her reading and meditated on
them. She read anything else in the
field that pertained and was especially struck by Birth Control and the Marriage Covenant (later retitled Sex and the Marriage Covenant) by John
Kippley, who wrote from the Roman Catholic point of view. Kippley writes that children are the primary
purpose of marriage and that to squelch that end is to profane the marriage
act. He compares contraception to the
feasting and vomiting practiced by ancient Romans and declares it contrary to
natural law and to the marriage covenant.
Covenant had special meaning for the Hahns as Scott was making covenant
theology the focus of his study. Just as
the love among the persons of the Trinity results in new life, so in the
marriage act new life results, the child embodying covenant oneness. If the marriage act is sacred, contraception
is profane.
In the Bible, Kimberly found, children are always described as a
blessing. She found no biblical blessings
for family planning or the spacing of children.
Fertility was to be "prized and celebrated." Before 1930, no Christian sect countenanced
birth control under any circumstances.
Luther, Calvin and the other Protestant reformers remained in accord
with Rome on their condemnation of contraception. Kimberly began to wonder whether her
understanding of contraception had been shaped more by popular opinion and the
media than by the Word of God. She and
Scott had trusted so much of their lives to God. Were they holding back in this one area? Could God be trusted with the right
timing? Furthermore, as they looked around at the
other young couples among their classmates, they saw that the planning of children did
not appear to be necessarily under human control.
One day a member of her study group commented that Kimberly seemed
convinced of the wrongness of contraception and asked whether she and Scott
still practiced it. She replied with the
fable of the hen and the pig who feel so grateful to Farmer Brown that they
decide to prepare him a feast. The hen
proposes a ham and egg breakfast but the pig demurs. “For you,” he says, “that would be a
donation. But for me it would be a total
commitment.”
Not long after that, the Hahns made the total commitment by throwing out
their contraceptives. For a few months
they practiced Natural Family Planning, which they saw as a kind of fasting. Then they concluded that they did not have
the serious circumstances NFP was meant for and decided to leave themselves
entirely open to God’s will. When Kimberly became
pregnant before their graduations, they
downgraded their plans for Scott to pursue a PhD and instead he accepted a post
as a minister. They eventually had five
children; Kimberly had three miscarriages as well.
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