{"id":15357,"date":"2013-05-20T13:08:09","date_gmt":"2013-05-20T17:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=15357"},"modified":"2013-05-20T13:08:09","modified_gmt":"2013-05-20T17:08:09","slug":"bad-logic-from-bad-catholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2013\/05\/bad-logic-from-bad-catholic.html","title":{"rendered":"Bad Logic from Bad Catholic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Marc of Bad Catholic has offered a \u201crebuttal\u201d<\/a> of my post of last week criticizing that simplistic\u00a0dandelion\u00a0rose illustration<\/a> supposedly showing the bad fruits of contraception and the good fruits of chastity. I\u2019m not going to bother with most of his rebuttal\u2014feel free to go over and read and critique it yourself\u2014but I do want to point out what horrid logic Catholics like Marc are reduced to in insisting that there\u2019s this huge gulf of a divide between \u201cunnatural\u201d contraception like the pill or IUDs and \u201cnatural\u201d contraception a la Natural Family Planning (which I have addressed in the past, by the way<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Here is how Marc talks about Natural Family Planning:<\/p>\n

From Libby Anne:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor one thing, the idea that contraception is rooted in selfishness as opposed to generosity is wrong. One reason people plan their pregnancies today is so that they can give the children they choose to have more attention and care.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s right. That people \u201cplan their pregnancies\u201d is hardly selfish. But \u201cplanning a pregnancy\u201d is not the same thing as using contraception. Catholic women are free to plan their\u00a0pregnancies, and through the use of effective methods of organic family planning, they do so with 98.2% typical-use effectiveness using the Sympto-Thermal method (1) or 96.8-98.0% typical-use effectiveness using the Creighton Model (2)(3) (to do a little name-dropping up in this blergh). Planning the time of a pregnancy is entirely fitting with the gift of marriage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I\u2019m not getting into the numbers of the studies he cites here except to say that they have methodological problems. One study, for instance, explicitly discounted essentially every couple who got pregnant while using the method, assuming that they did so on purpose because they broke the rules of the method and had sex when they weren\u2019t supposed to. That\u2019s simply not how effectiveness statistics work. But again, that\u2019s neither here nor there and not the purpose of this post.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Marc talks about other forms of contraception:<\/p>\n

From Libby Anne:<\/p>\n

Additionally, there is literally no reason that contraception would give flower to divorce.<\/p>\n

I can think of a pretty simple reason why an increase in contraception would lead to an increase in divorce.\u00a0It is a well-discussed fact that childless couples are more likely to divorce than couples with children<\/a>, and, according to the study \u201cMarital Dissolution: Divorce, Separation, Annulment and Widowhood,<\/a>\u201c\u00a0published in the\u00a0Handbook of Marriage and the Family,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe likelihood of a divorce decreases as the number of children in a family increases.\u201d I am reminded of\u00a0a study of Qatari women<\/a>\u00a0showing precisely the same phenomenon: \u201cFor every child in a family, the likelihood that couple will divorce goes down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given that contraception is an effort not have children, it\u2019s a smidgebit optimistic to trumpet the impossibility of a link between contraception and divorce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So let me get this straight. Catholic couples following the Church\u2019s prohibition on birth control can still use Natural Family Planning to plan when and if to have children. But contraception (as opposed to couples following Natural Family Planning) causes higher divorce rates because it allows couples to plan when and if to have children, and couples with fewer children have higher divorce rates. In what universe does this make any sense?<\/p>\n

Look, if you think that not having kids causes higher divorce rates, then say that! But don\u2019t say that NFP allows you to control when and if to have kids just as much as artificial contraception does\u2014nay, more\u2014and then claim that artificial contraception (and not NFP) leads to higher divorce rates because couples who use it to choose to have fewer or no kids have higher divorce rates. Because that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.<\/p>\n

(To be honest, one of the things that led to my becoming disillusioned with the Catholic Church was a similar sort of double standard. Contraception left the marital act without procreative value, and was therefore morally wrong, but it was totally fine and morally good to use Natural Family Planning to render the marital act non-procreative.)<\/p>\n

Marc needs to explain how contraception leads to higher risk of divorce by allowing couples to choose to have fewer children, while Natural Family Planning, which he claims allows couples to do the same thing, does not.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc of Bad Catholic has offered a “rebuttal” of my post of last week criticizing that simplistic dandelion rose illustration supposedly showing the bad fruits of contraception and the good fruits of chastity. I’m not going to bother with most of his rebuttal—feel free to go over and read and critique it yourself—but I do want to point out some rather bad logic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[119,23,106],"class_list":["post-15357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","tag-birth-control","tag-catholicism","tag-marriage-2"],"yoast_head":"\nBad Logic from Bad Catholic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Marc of Bad Catholic has offered a "rebuttal" of my post of last week criticizing that simplistic dandelion rose illustration supposedly showing the bad fruits of contraception and the good fruits of chastity. 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