Birth Control and a Lame Objection to NFP-ers

This post is concerned with the larger discussion of the morality of contraception.  Most people these days would think my mention of the morality of it is rather out of place.  You know, philosophers in other peoples bedrooms, etc.?  The privacy line in that sort of evasion is surely poppycock but the devil doesn't mind poppycock when it functions to deaden the conscience from the pricks that start life-changing inquiries.   This post, however, isn't about the ethics of contraception per se.   I only bring up parts of the discussion in hopes to get the gears turning and perhaps defuse at least one annoying objection that defenders of contraception throw back at the contra-contraception Catholic crew.

The news today: Obama decides to have birth control covered at no cost to the insured (by requiring insurance companies to pay for it).  A lot of talk these days about birth control seems muddled.  For example, the phrase 'birth control'.  Like many words and phrases in pop-speech, esp., news reports, 'birth control' doesn't mean what it says.   If we asked somebody what it means, I suspect we'd hear its meaning explained by other words like 'contraception', 'the pill', 'safe sex'.   And if we asked how it is that contraception controls birth we'd discover the obvious.  It controls it by preventing conception. At least 'contraception' is allowed to mean what it says.  And contraception is surely birth control, in one sense.  For by making birth remain in non-existence contraception controls it.  By implication --and mark this! --contraception controls a whole future population of fellow human beings.  Obviously, contraception is an incalculable and incredible power. 

Anyway, once we got this far, it would still take a moment for most heads to register the obvious truth that not having sex also prevents conception.  But now ask: Is abstention contraception? Not in any obvious way.  For contraception is a means to then end of making having sex not result in conception --a way to infertilize sex.  Abstention, by contrast, is not a way of having sex so as to prevent conception. It's obvious way; abstention is not a way of having sex at all.

It more often occurs to castigate the contra-contraception crew than to question the assumed wisdom of having, using, and promoting contraception.   This incredible and inestimable power to control birth and millions of future individuals is used with carte blanche.  Is that wise?  No.  Grasping this ought to at least make the pro-contraceptors respect the (non)curmudgeonly Catholics or moral traditionalists.

But grasping how abstention can't really be contraception ought to clarify the debate concerning whether contraception is wrongdoing. 

There is a common objection to Catholic morality which proscribes contraception.  For it allows 'natural family planning' (NFP).  The objector says that Catholics hold a double standard in allowing NFP but not contraception.  The objector says the cases are the same: ror in each case the couple, is it said, "intends to not have children".  

But pay attention to what prevents conception in each case.   What prevents conception is entirely different in these two cases.  I'm not yet attempting to settle the ethics by this distinction, but to deflate the force of this common objection.  An NFP bumper sticker could say: abstention prevents conception.   So it follows that an ordinary NFPer does not infertilze a single sex act.  However, if one used the NFP technique for one's entire marriage then it would be morally no different than contraception, for such a policy is an aim to avoid all fertile sex acts and manifests the hope that all sex be infertile.  Such concubinage is, however, significantly different in nature than contraception.  For one, the infertile sex acts in such a scenario are not made infertile.  Contraception is a means to infertilize this sex act.  It embodies the aim to make infertile.  It is a different sort of animal than abstention, though the final end 'to not have children' is the same.   So the objector isn't completely out to lunch.  The end to limit family size is shared in common.  But the means in NFP and contraception are different in nature.

To say they are different in nature does not answer whether one, the other, both, or neither are wrong actions.  But it is possible that one be wrong and not the other.  And the Catholic case against contraception requires this possibility.