Making Babies: A Very Different Look at Natural Family Planning
But another reason for NFP's allegedly high success rate is that couples who use it are prepared to welcome children and so don't blame NFP for unexpected pregnancies. Four of my own five children came the NFP way -- that is, totally unexpectedly -- and that's a good thing, because without them bouncing in as surprises, excuses to delay (the sort of excuses one might hear from a recruit in parachute training) might have gone on for a very long time. As it is, in a mere matter of ten years, my wife and I assembled a complete basketball team. And if menopause doesn't strike my wife soon, who knows what sort of team we might assemble.
Rather than bite one's nails to the quick at the prospect of baby number ten -- which, if one marries in one's early 20s and practices NFP, is a definite possibility -- we should encourage the attitude of the more the merrier, which is a far more attractive case to make than all the goo-goo language about how NFP helps couples "communicate" and about the joy of charting temperatures and discharges and plotting one's conjugal acts as a captain might chart a course for his ship.
Seems like a rehash of an essay I recall him publishing in Crisis a few years ago, or maybe I'm confusing it with another "the Church commands you to have as many babies as you can sire, even if you can't actually rear them" anti-NFP essays that make the rounds every so often.
Sounds like he's still on the same asinine ego trip that some find funny, others find offensive, and I just find boring.
Dull writing, gratuitous insults, and lots of machismo...a winning combination for Harry Crocker's bank account but, like Chris West's flights of fancy, the butcher's bill will be paid by "normal" Catholics.
Sane people need not apply.