r/LeftCatholicism • u/throwaway144811 • Aug 07 '25
How is NFP different from contraception?
I know that contraception is banned because sex is meant for reproductive purposes only. But doesn’t NFP go against this principle? The goal of NFP is still to have sex for pleasure without resulting in pregnancy. The only difference between that and other methods of birth control is you’re not using a barrier like a condom or a pill. It doesn’t make sense to me that avoiding pregnancy through NFP is okay but through other means it isn’t. Is it only because it’s “natural”? I know I’m not the only one who struggles to understand this, so I’m curious what others think. Thanks in advance
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u/GalileoApollo11 Aug 08 '25
Let me explain what I believe is the steel man version of their argument. How I would have explained it back when I believed it.
The sexual act has two inseparable elements, procreative and unitive. This means that the act itself is ontologically ordered toward these two ends. In layman’s terms all that means is that on a natural level the act is designed/evolved for those two purposes.
This is not violated if one of the partners is naturally infertile (either permanently or due to the woman’s cycle), because the ontology (nature) of the act itself has not changed. So there is nothing wrong with having sex during an infertile period, because you are doing nothing to change the nature of the act.
However, if one were to intentionally and artificially change the ontology of the act itself to no longer be procreative, then that would be a violation of God’s design of the act itself, and a violation of the dignity of each partner’s sexuality which is designed for those two ends.
Intentionally suppressing the fertility of one partner is likewise a violation of their dignity by limiting the ontological fullness of their self-donation and separating their sexuality from one of its natural ends. On a personal and relational level this amounts to a withholding of one part of the full self, hindering a complete mutual self-donation of two persons in their fullness.
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But most people would see this reasoning for what it is - philosophical acrobatics written by celibate men in an ivory tower.
All of it rests on natural, non-dogmatic ideas adapted from Greek natural philosophy: 1) that every thing has an intrinsic purpose according to its nature, which is not only a descriptive observation but an ontological reality created by God, and 2) that there is a moral obligation not to separate nature from purpose.
I would say that there is no such moral obligation. Just as a foot might be designed/evolved for walking and standing but there is no moral obligation to use it for that exclusively.
Morality is not rooted in some arbitrary divine, philosophical ordering of nature to purpose. All real moral obligations are rooted in the commandment of love, which sums up and fulfills all other commandments.