Contraceptive use is essential
We’ve covered it before in The Spectrum and it has received quite a bit of attention via letters to the editor, articles and more. Thanks to the Bush administration, the rising cost of contraception is making affordable birth control a fantasy for many college students. Amy Jacobson took a close look at the issue and has a follow-up in this issue.
What I want to talk about in this article is what the Roman Catholic Church parades about as the ultimate, purest and only non-sinful form of birth control: Natural Family Planning.
It is a program that promotes periodic abstinence during the most fertile periods of the menstrual cycle. It’s like you’re using the charts to predict the weather on your own. You could call it a science but it’s difficult to predict and unreliable.
For it to be at all successful it requires complete, 100 percent devotion to the plan. According to the Guttmacher Institute, NFP actually has a perfect use failure rate of 9 percent per year. That is if you’re using the program without error. Typical statistical failure rates are 25 percent. It will likely fail for one out of every four people on the plan.
I find it ironic that you’ll find many of the pro-life Collegians for Life supporting NFP when it’s a plan that rejects all other contraception use, even pre-marital sex. That’s right, if you use a condom the Roman Catholic Church thinks you’re committing a terrible sin. And they won’t even let you think about pre-marital sex. Oh no, that’s a sin.
According to the Church, teens that are getting pregnant are forced to marry and likely live an unhappy life. We all know that unhappy marriages often lead to divorce and not condom use. Now consider that the Catholic Church expects you to pay in half a grand just to be accepted back in their happy little family.
Because of the Church’s stance on contraceptive use these families are likely to have a gaggle of children all growing up in a torn family, often fated to repeat their parents’ mistakes. The Church’s pro-life and anti-contraception stance only causes more problems than it solves.
Getting started with Natural Family Planning isn’t even as cheap and easy as they’d lead you to believe. They encourage you to take classes to become “educated” on the program, relationships, abstinence and why you shouldn’t use contraceptives. Ironically, the classes are organized and taught usually by a priest who has taken a vow of celibacy. I have a hard time understanding why a priest, who has denied his right to children, should tell you when to conceive.
If you look up NFP at fargodiocese.org classes start anywhere from $75 to $120. If your loved one is not Catholic, the church will expect you to make a donation of around $1,000.
If you ask me, you’re better off using real contraception. It’s safer too. It’s funny that Natural Family Planning fails to recognize the risks of STDs. If your loved one has genital warts, it’s common sense that you’re going to want to use a condom to minimize the risk of passing it on.
Natural Family Planning assumes you’re not using any other contraception. With a condom and the pill you can safeguard against pregnancy and STDs. There are plenty of other options as well. IUDs have a first year failure rate of less than 1 percent, according to the John Hopkins School of public health.
If Admiral Ackbar saw NFP, he would scream, “It’s a trap.” Whatever “statistics” they might throw out, I wouldn’t trust Natural Family Planning from a distance with a fifteen-foot pole.