So contraception to prevent pregnancy thwarts God’s will, but trying to thwart pregnancy via the avoidance of sex when a woman might become pregnant is alright.
Isn’t God more powerful than a thin latex barrier? As those opposed to condoms or birth control pills assert when counseling against sex outside marriage - birth control isn’t 100% effective - so isn’t there enough wiggle room for God to get around barriers humans might throw in her way? - whether condoms, rhythm method or pill? The intent is the same - avoid pregnancy; it is only the method that differs - mere hair splitting.
Clerics argued against anesthia for women during childbirth when it was first utilized to that end as avoiding the full penalty of woman’s ‘curse’ - and avoiding “God’s will.” This article expresses the same mentality. If God’s purposes are worked out in spite of a condom at the outset or a life support system at the end - God’s will will be accomplished in traditional theology.
More power to them I suppose.
No barrier. No pills. No thwarting God’s will here.
Just abstinence until fertile times and the couple wishes to conceive.
Please read some of the other links for more explanation about Natural Family Planning.
It isn’t just a matter of God wanting more babies. Unlike condoms or the pill, abstinence doesn’t turn a sacrament between a husband and wife, meant to create life, into a self-serving recreational act.
Just out of curiosity (and it might help me to understand better where you're coming from theologically) was that a typo?
I wouldn't put it that way. It's more about the wholeness or the nature of the act.
What do we think about the Romans who ate and then made themselves sick so they could eat some more? Don't we consider that intrinsically perverse, revolting not just because puking is revolting (by definition?) but because, whatever the fallibility of Aristotle, we think that eating is FOR nourishment, that the mastication and swallowing are just the beginning part of an hours long nutritional process, and that to break it up and frustrate it by unnatural emesis is almost emblematic of the fractured state of fallen man.
In thinking about this, I find that the word "artificial" in "artificial birth control" is important. There is a natural birth control technique, and it's well known. Chastity among the unmarried is not generally considered perverse or unnatural, is it?
When I was a Protestant I thought that the Catholic view arose out the Church's alleged aversion to people having any fun. As time went by I saw wives sort of throwing themselves at their husbands like a sop to Cerberus, to hush their whining because there was no "real" "practical" reason, since they'd rendered themselves infertile, to deny what Kant supposedly called "the mutual abuse of bodies."
"After all," said a friend, "it doesn't take that long, and afterwards he'll go to sleep and I can get back to my book."
In this view the playful or urgent side of sexual intercourse is exaggerated to the point that, if it were possible, the animal side of human nature would be sundered from that which makes us human. The notion that sexual intercourse is, at its best and properly, the deliberate and considered physical joining of mature saints who honor and cherish one another and have committed themselves to do so for the rest of their lives is lost in a the notion of a vacation from reality and humanity, or of the mere quieting of an appetite.
AND, with contraception (and abortion) the generally more insistent urge to merge of the male is not so likely to be brought up into the human realm of deliberate choice because part of the act itself is excised from it.
It is also interesting to remember the promises made about ABC. There would be a reduction in unwanted pregnancy and divorce. I am 60 years old and I remember the conversation (and believed the promises.) Some time back I was discussing this with a woman maybe 10 years younger than I and she had no recollection of all that was said before Griswold v. Connecticut when states could prohibit the sale of contraceptives even to married people. Those promises were broken and have been forgotten, except when they are re-made to argue for free or reduced-price contraception for college kids or the poor.
Our culture now generally assumes that chastity is a disease for which intercourse is the cure, and the ABC-enabled sundering of sexual activity from full humanity has not worked out well for us.
That'll do for an opening articulation of "the other" view. It's not well-expressed and it's incomplete, but I hope it presents the thinking comprehensibly.
"Besides, he [Onan; C.P.] not only defrauded his brother of the right due him, but also preferred his semen to putrify on the ground, rather than to beget a son in his brother's name. V. 10 The Jews quite immodestly gabble concerning this thing. It will suffice for me briefly to have touched upon this as much as modestly as speaking permits. The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring. The impiety is especially condemned, now by the Spirit through Moses' mouth, that Onan, as it were, by a violent abortion, no less cruelly than filthily cast upon the ground the offspring of his brother, torn from the maternal womb. Besides, in this way he tried, as far as he was able, to wipe out a part of the human race. If any woman ejects a foetus from her womb by drugs, it is reckoned a crime incapable of expiation and deservedly Onan incurred upon himself the same kind of punishment, infecting the earth by his semen, in order that Tamar might not conceive a future human being as an inhabitant of the earth." (Calvin's Commentary on Genesis 38:8-10, translated from the Latin)"