Danielle Bean has an excellent article over at Inside Catholic that I so needed today.
I read this and I started to cry:
When a battle-weary mother stands alone in her bathroom looking with disbelief at two tiny pink lines on a pregnancy test, it’s too late for family-planning discussions of clinical effectiveness. We’ve got a baby to take care of. And his mother…
“Soon after I announced that we were (unexpectedly) pregnant with our eighth child,” an older mom once wrote me, “I came out of Mass one day and found an NFP flyer tucked under the windshield wiper of my van. I even wondered if it was our pastor who put it there.”
Shame on us.
Whether we love NFP or hate it, whether we choose to use it in our marriages or not, whether we have one child or 16 children, we Catholics have no business receiving new life with anything but charity and joy. We have no business labeling our fellow Catholics, in their time of need and vulnerability, as crazy or irresponsible.
It takes courage for many Catholic couples to continue to refuse contraception, to remain open to life in their marriages, even when their circumstances are already difficult and they are hoping to avoid another pregnancy. The “99 percent effective” number people like to throw around about NFP becomes a much smaller one when translated into “user effectiveness.”
Thank you and God bless you.