A surprisingly respectful article from the Washington Post, also amazingly sneer-free.
Ashley McGuire fell in love with the Catholic Church five years ago, after reading its teaching against artificial birth control.
McGuire, then a skeptical Protestant college student, initially saw the ban as a mandatory march to “domestic slavery.” But the more she read, the more she was blown away by the idea that sex — and women’s bodies — must be about more than physical pleasure.
Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.
“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.
McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.
The article does not really get the nuances concerning Serious motives, just reasons, proportionately serious reasons in regards to the spacing of children. Despite that, quite a positive article considering the author Michelle Boorstein is not exactly known for friendly articles regarding the Church.
7 comments
When I was married , lived wih my husband for over 30 yrs. , I found out later that even thou we had 5 children and 1 miscarriage he had relationships outside of our marriage.. The pill could of saved my family from yrs. of mental and physical abuse.
Every Family is Different. Having 5 Children was more than he wanted.
This obsession your religion has with other people’s sex is truly baffling.
She makes some excellent points. Most people assume that people who have less than a tribe of kids must use contraceptives and those that do use nfp and have children, got pregnant accidentally 🙁 Even the priest at our parish is convinced that it doesn’t work *sigh* With today’s technology there myriads of tools to help women chart their cycles and avoid putting chemicals in their bodies. It’s weird that women who refuse to drink milk that contains artificial hormones don’t give a second thought to popping that pill!
Most comments here are revealing – children are a source of misery and not a blessing. I recently discovered a term for when a society not only fails to reproduce itself, but in the face of that knowledge, persists in saying it’s overpopulated, views pregnancy as an illness and babies as a threat, and prefers sterile sexual behavior. That term is – sociocide. There’s a pretty convincing case that it’s already too late for many societies, but I suppose it is nice this WaPo reporter didn’t sneer in her article. There might be an argument to remove sex from marriage/family that is not at its root selfish – I just haven’t heard such an argument yet. How can anyone who understands math can think all these entitlement-providing governments, already dangerously in debt, will continue as generations shrink?
Salvage:
It’s the secular world that’s obsessed unhealthily with sex. We’re trying to show that it’s got focus and purpose – more than just getting one’s jollies.
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