True confessions.<\/p>\n
My wife and I used it for a short time when we were told by our physician, as young about-to-be married evangelicals at age 23, that if we didn\u2019t want to have a baby in our first year, the best and safest route was the Pill.<\/p>\n
When we decided we wanted to start our family, Jean went off it some time before the end of that first year.<\/p>\n
No one told us about Natural Family Planning (NFP), except the usual anti-Catholic joke:<\/p>\n
Question: \u201cWhat do you call couples who are on NFP?\u201d<\/p>\n
Answer: \u201cPregnant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our fellow evangelicals\u2013including theologians\u2013wholeheartedly endorsed artificial means of contraception as theologically permissible for committed Christians.<\/p>\n
And no one had told us\u2013perhaps they did not know then (1976)\u2013of the risks of using the Pill: possible sterility, depression, massive changes to the woman\u2019s body that can produce all sorts of other problems, not to mention making it difficult to become pregnant after going off the Pill.<\/p>\n
Nor were we ever told of what it might mean theologically to separate the marital act\u2013which obviously is designed to make a baby\u2013from the possibility of making a baby.<\/p>\n