“Tormented by Difficulties of Every Kind”: Catholic Teaching on Contraception in Social Context

Abstract

The Catholic Church notably condemns all forms of artificial birth control and advocates natural family planning as the only morally licit means of spacing births. This teaching is presented as the quintessential pathway to the fullness of human sexuality, but many Catholics struggle with it, and the magisterium itself recognizes that this path is not an easy one to follow. This article uses recent developments in Catholic moral theology around the notion of structural sin to examine the structural constraints complicating ordinary Catholics’ pursuit of their tradition’s vision for marital sexuality, demonstrating that larger structural forces can considerably affect the perceived viability of Catholic teaching on contraception. As a result, the article highlights the importance of linking Catholic sexual ethics and social ethics to provide a more credible vision for a more compassionate approach to married life.

Arguably no moral teaching is more closely identified with the Roman Catholic Church than its distinctive ban on artificial forms of birth control.¹ From practically the moment the Anglican Church offered its approval of artificial contraception at Lambeth in 1930, the Roman Catholic Church has found itself on an isolated journey among Christian denominations, condemning as immoral a practice that virtually all others tolerate or overtly support, at least for married couples.² Over the years, the uniqueness of this position has become fodder for some of the opposition to it, as otherwise committed Catholics question how the magisterium could be right in defending a position that they take to be so clearly at odds with not just the conventions of the day, but a broadly construed sensus fidelium.³ Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has steadfastly maintained its official magisterial position, asserting that there is a deep and abiding truth, beauty, and goodness in this teaching, through which “sexuality is respected and promoted in its truly and fully human dimension.”⁴ At the same time, magisterial documents regularly admit that fidelity to this teaching is not always easy to attain, particularly given the real-life context of couples who are “at times truly tormented by difficulties of every kind, not only individual difficulties but social ones as well.”⁵ As a result, the Catholic position on birth control is more intriguing than the usual polarized discourse about it might suggest, for if both the magisterium’s claims are true, then there is a teaching that offers great benefits to all people of good will, but which also at the same time appears to be unattainable for many if not most.⁶

This article examines this tension and identifies more clearly the kinds of structural reforms that would be necessary to make this high ideal seem more attainable for more Catholics. To arrive at these insights, the article proceeds through three parts. The first briefly describes the current state of Catholic theological reflection on the influence of broader social and cultural factors on moral agency, relying primarily on recent developments in the ethical category of structural sin to defend the claim that structural forces can have a consequential impact on moral choices even while moral agents maintain their innate freedom. The second part then employs these categories to conduct a qualitative analysis of two case studies in which Catholic couples are struggling to practice natural family planning (NFP) in the United States, applying the categories from the first part to highlight the structural forces that facilitate and frustrate their efforts to observe the Catholic Church’s teachings on “the responsible transmission of life.”⁷ The particularity of this analysis is crucial because structural forces are closely intertwined with culture, so the opportunities and challenges shaping moral decisions will vary from place to place.⁸ Consequently, any detailed structural analysis must be context-specific. The evaluation in this article thus focuses on experiences in the United States, not to suggest that these experiences are representative for the rest of the world, but to show how a meaningful form of structural analysis can proceed within a specific context. The process has relevance for a similar evaluation in other global contexts, but the immediate observations are necessarily confined to and directed at the US context. The US-specific structural analysis ultimately leads to the third part of the article, which proposes three specific structural reforms that would create more favorable conditions for the practical embrace of the Catholic Church’s vision for responsible parenthood in the United States.⁹

All together, the article demonstrates that real stumbling blocks to the observance of Catholic teaching on birth control currently exist and, significantly, that the burden of these stumbling blocks is borne unevenly. Critically, the article argues that the insufficient attention these structural obstacles receive in the official promotion of Catholic teaching on contraception as a positive good for marriage (and society) ultimately reinforces the unevenness of these burdens by diverting attention away from the things Catholics could be doing to shift the weight of these constraints. In this way, the article establishes a close connection between the Catholic Church’s sexual ethics and its social ethics, demonstrating that it will always be disingenuous to promote Catholic teachings about sexual morality without championing Catholic social teaching with equal vigor.

Structural Influences on Agency: A Non-Deterministic Approach

To make sense of the magisterium’s claims about the challenges of observing the Catholic teaching on birth control in a way that remains faithful to the accounts of couples’ experiences with those challenges, one must appreciate how external social forces can shape moral behavior. Of course, this is something of a delicate point to acknowledge because a recognition of social influence can quickly sound like a denial of personal responsibility if the relationship between social context and moral agency is not sufficiently nuanced. Fortunately, Catholic moral theology has the resources to describe just such a nuanced account due to developments in the concept of structural sin.

From the start, Catholic theological reflection on the notion of structural sin has been colored by the fear that any acceptance of social influences on the moral life could undermine the Catholic understanding of personal moral agency and responsibility.¹⁰ As the Second Vatican Council’s invitation to attend to the global voices in the Catholic Church began to take hold, however, theologians and bishops’ conferences advocated for an explicit incorporation of the idea of social sin or structural sin into the magisterium’s vocabulary.¹¹ Eventually, their entreaties received a hearing in Rome, resulting in John Paul II’s gradual adoption of the term, first with the acknowledgment of social sins in “the relationships between the various human communities” in his 1984 apostolic exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia and then with a full-throated embrace of “structures of sin” as an analytic category in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.¹² In both cases, however, a degree of ambiguity persisted. John Paul II gave clear support to the idea that structures of sin had a profound negative impact in the world but just as clearly maintained that they “are rooted in personal sin,” and thus always tied back to personal responsibility.¹³ As a result, the notions of both social sin and structural sin were incorporated in magisterial teaching, but a definitive account of the interactions between personal agency and structural influence remained elusive.

In the years since John Paul II’s pronouncements about social sin and structural sin, theologians have sought to resolve some of the tensions surrounding the power of social forces and the primacy of personal agency.¹⁴ The chief result of these reflections was a twofold acknowledgment that social pressures can have a real impact on moral choices and that personal moral agents remain responsible for the choices they make even when those choices are shaped by the structures agents inhabit. Yet, none of the initial analyses fully resolved what Daniel Daly has come to characterize as “the structure-agency problem in Catholic ethics.”¹⁵ More recently, however, a group of scholars (including Daly) has turned to the critical realist school of sociology to better define social structures and their causal influence, yielding an insightful account of how social structures can have a genuine impact on agency without usurping the individual agent’s free will. It is this account that offers the most valuable resources for an analysis of the obstacles that shape the observance of the Catholic teaching on contraception in the United States today.

The chief architect of the critical realist turn has been Daniel Finn, who provided an account of the causal influence of social structures that is in keeping with the profound respect for freedom found in Catholic theological anthropology.¹⁶ Following critical realist sociologists, especially Margaret Archer, Finn has proposed that “social structures emerge from the actions of individuals and require the participation of individuals for their continued existence. But structures have an independent existence and independent causal effects in the lives of those individuals.”¹⁷ In this claim, Finn is consistent with the work of other theologians who have tried to acknowledge the power of structural sin, but what Finn adds from his critical realist interlocutors is a clearer sense of how these independent structures exert their “independent causal effects.”

First, Finn describes the “systems of human relations among social positions” that define everyone’s daily interactions in a functioning society.¹⁸ He gives the example of a university professor whose social position is defined in relation to their colleagues (equal to some, subordinate to others), their students (over whom the professor has authority but to whose end-of-semester evaluations they remain beholden), and various aspects of the university itself (like committees with the powers of promotion, tenure, and termination).¹⁹ These relations among social positions create a series of “restrictions, enablements, and incentives” that make some choices more appealing and others more fraught for the people occupying a specific position.²⁰ Personal moral agents remain free to pick whatever path they want to follow through this system of restrictions, enablements, and incentives, but they also must reckon with the fact that some pathways will generate rewards while others will introduce costs. Thus, a new tenure track professor at a research university remains free to decide to focus on teaching above all else, but they will surely pay a price for the lack of publications when senior colleagues on the tenure committee review their CV. In this way, “persons retain their freedom … [but] that freedom is exercised within constraints that make some choices more costly than others.”²¹ As a result, “conscious human persons [always] make decisions in light of those restrictions, enablements, and incentives—decisions that might be quite different had this person been facing different restrictions, enablements, or incentives.”²²

Here then is an account of the causal power of social structures that can make sense of the magisterium’s own acknowledgment that social difficulties affect the reception of Catholic teachings on birth control. What Finn’s research establishes is not simply the commonsense assertion that people in different circumstances often make different decisions, but the plausible expectation that the same person will likely pursue different choices depending on the restrictions, enablements, and incentives presented to them at the time. The Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual ethics, particularly its teachings on contraception, therefore, cannot be separated from Catholicism’s social ethics because Catholics must account for the ways in which social structures can shape not only the appeal of Catholic moral norms but also the apparent feasibility of following them. For some Catholics, the enablements and incentives accompanying their social position will make practicing NFP a straightforward choice, but for others, the restrictions connected to their social positions might make a rejection of artificial forms of birth control appear prohibitively costly in much more than an economic sense. As free agents, the couples in both contexts are always capable of choosing to follow the magisterium’s teachings; the structural forces they experience are non-deterministic and therefore can never be said to “make” someone violate moral norms. Yet the structural forces do have a real impact, and as a result the path to the observance of magisterial norms is not identical in both cases. To simply expect everyone to hew to the same standard, when some are effectively rewarded for that decision by their social context while others can do so only at great cost due to theirs, is not simply unrealistic but also downright callous.

Given these factors, the Catholic conversation around contraception needs to account for the larger social structures facilitating and frustrating the observance of the magisterium’s teachings. Others, especially theologians, have called for this kind of recognition before, but almost always by appealing to the distinctiveness of individual experiences to suggest that agents ought to be given greater discretion in their personal moral discernment.²³ By employing the lens of structural influence that emerges from the recent research on structural sin, however, we can shift the conversation in two important ways. First, we can appreciate how the challenges, when they are felt, are not just the isolated experiences of individual agents, but are often reflective of much larger structural forces that create broadly shared constraints on moral agency. This can helpfully promote a more compassionate, pastoral approach to the challenges of practicing the Catholic Church’s vision for marital sexuality—an approach that more closely aligns with Pope Francis’s call to embrace “the way of mercy.”²⁴ Second, and relatedly, we can state emphatically that the responsibility for addressing the gap between theoretical teaching and concrete practice does not fall on a single couple alone but must be shared by the whole church, as the people of God, so that the costs of following the official prescriptions are no longer uniquely burdensome to those who occupy certain social positions while all but nonexistent for those who have the luxury of privilege.

The only way to make these shifts, however, is to appreciate the specific restrictions, enablements, and incentives that shape decisions about birth control in real-life contexts. To get a better sense of these factors, the second section now turns to two Catholic women’s accounts of their own experiences with NFP to identify the social structures influencing their moral discernment. As noted at the outset, these accounts reflect the situation of Catholicism in the United States, where the use of NFP is far less common than in other nations.²⁵ This outlier status, however, makes the United States a particularly relevant starting point for the structural analysis advocated in this article, for one way of accounting for the discrepancies is by attending to the structural forces that unevenly create burdens and opportunities for women in the United States.

Experiential Evidence: Two Illustrations of Structural Influence

For our qualitative analysis, we rely on the accounts of two women, Kendra and “GS,” who navigated the practice of NFP with their husbands for years before ultimately deciding to abandon it.²⁶ Their accounts come from two different blogs and are part of a larger phenomenon of Catholic couples, and especially Catholic women, sharing their experiences with the challenges of NFP via internet forums, typically out of a desire to portray a more “realistic” sense of what NFP looks like for real practioners of it. In keeping with the ethnographical turn in theological ethics, we treat each case study as a Catholic cultural artifact, delving into each text in some detail so as to arrive at a clearer sense of the structural obstacles and supports influencing their decisions. As scholars championing the application of ethnographic insights to theological ethics have maintained, “in order to have anything like generalized claims of what ought to be, Christian theologians and ethicists ought to start with the particular as integral to their methods of inquiry. In other words, before such scholars can state what is normative, they need to cultivate a ‘thick description’ (Geertz) of what is real to and within concrete congregations and communities.”²⁷ Certainly, one way to answer this call is to undertake firsthand ethnographic research, as an increasing number of theological ethicsts have done.²⁸

Part of what we want to show here is that the instincts animating the ethnographic turn are relevant even for those theological ethicsts and moral theologians who do not, or cannot, conduct their own ethnographies. By viewing personal narratives as worthy sources for theological and ethical reflection, theological ethicsts can employ the same “empathetic listening … [that] asks, ‘what is going on here?’” and which “can situate Catholic ethics in the complex contexts of the everyday person’s struggles of Christian discipleship.”²⁹ Although a detailed view of these struggles is valuable for Catholic theological ethics in general—especially in light of Pope Francis’s call for a model of moral theology that is oriented toward accompaniment—it is even more vital for the questions surrounding sexual ethics at the heart of this article.³⁰ Broader numbers and aggregate data will tell only one part of the story behind the (globally) atypical family planning practices of US Catholics but, to discern what is really going on here, we need to spend time with the “thick” descriptions of personal accounts and analyze them carefully.

Motivated by these methodological considerations, we prioritize depth over breadth in this section to achieve the sustained engagement with the particular that can lead to a richer understanding of the real context in which ethical norms are encountered and received. Other women’s descriptions of their own challenges with NFP, and the limited quantitative data discussed following, indicate that the two accounts we examine are not extreme outliers, but our point in this section is not to suggest that these specific accounts are representative of every Catholic couple’s experience with NFP.³¹ Rather, informed by the Catholic vision of the common good as “the good of all and of each individual”³² and inspired by St. Paul’s admonition that “if one member [of the Body of Christ] suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26), we believe that these experiences of genuine anguish can stand on their own as a sufficient reminder of the collective responsibility all Catholics must bear to address the structural challenges inhibiting the moral agency of their brothers and sisters, even if others have different experiences.

The two women whose stories are discussed in this section adopted similar dispositions. Both were Catholics who began their married lives committed to the Catholic Church’s teaching prohibiting artificial forms of birth control. Both had significant reasons for postponing childbirth, and so each intended to use NFP as a means of practicing the “responsible parenthood” that led them to “decide not to have additional children” immediately.³³ The difficulties of observing periodic abstinence as their sole means of postponing childbirth, however, ultimately led both women to “quit NFP,” albeit in two different directions: Kendra resigned herself to an unrestricted acceptance of future pregnancies while GS’s husband had a vasectomy. Both stories illuminate the structural constraints Catholic couples currently face in their efforts to embrace this dimension of the Catholic Church’s moral teachings on marital sexuality and highlight the need for a broader recognition and stronger embrace of the interconnectedness between sexual ethics and social ethics in the Catholic tradition.

Kendra’s Story

Kendra is a Catholic blogger whose 2013 blog post “Why I Don’t Do NFP” generated both praise and controversy.³⁴ The blog post details her personal experience following church teaching on natural child spacing throughout the course of her marriage. Kendra writes that she and her soon-to-be husband were excited by the ardent NFP testimonials they heard during their marriage prep classes and anticipated that the practice would benefit their marriage. Upon marrying, Kendra and her husband decided to avoid pregnancy because he was pursuing a graduate degree. In practice, they bent their NFP method’s rules and ended up having two babies back to back. When Kendra looks back at this time in her life, she sees their failure to practice stringent NFP as God’s wisdom prevailing over their human strategizing.³⁵

After giving birth to her second child, Kendra referenced NFP educational material and tried to begin charting again. She was pregnant within two months. After giving birth to her third child, she decided to learn another method because she was getting pregnant outside of the normal fertile window. With this new method, she got pregnant with her fourth child despite having intercourse on a day that was significantly outside her predicted fertile window. Just three days prior to this fourth pregnancy, Kendra and her husband found out that he had stage III melanoma. With the benefit of hindsight, however, she came to conclude that having a “husband with cancer is absolutely the BEST time to be pregnant.”³⁶ Thinking about their growing fourth child gave them a welcome, joyful distraction from worrying about his cancer treatments and, after the baby was born, her husband’s time off work (recovering from treatments) provided meaningful bonding time, resulting in a special connection to their fourth child. When Kendra was in doubt about whether she would lose her husband, she writes that she felt very grateful that if she did lose him, she would have this baby as “one last piece” of him.³⁷ She was glad that NFP had failed to prevent this pregnancy. Number five was on the way soon thereafter, conceived before Kendra’s regular menstrual cycle returned.

Kendra writes that she experienced anger toward NFP only when she began to practice it more effectively. After five children, her husband “really felt that it was important that we figure out how to practice NFP responsibly and well” because he had just sold his company and was looking for another job.³⁸ Kendra began charting carefully and conservatively, adding extra days of abstinence to increase the likelihood of avoiding pregnancy. However, Kendra did not enjoy practicing NFP so stringently. She found it “messy and time consuming and complicated.”³⁹ Furthermore, her conscience bothered her about postponing pregnancy, even for grave reasons. She knew the Catholic Church recognized economic reasons as a legitimate cause to delay childbirth, but she did not like “being in charge of how many babies [she] would have and when [she] would have them.”⁴⁰ After a year of charting in this way, she convinced her husband that NFP was not good for them, and they stopped using NFP altogether.⁴¹ A sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth pregnancy followed. “I have no intention of ever practicing NFP again,” she explains. “I’m not good at it, I don’t like it, and I don’t think it’s worth it… I really suffered every month of our time doing NFP.”⁴² Kendra believes her and her husband’s decision not to contracept contributed to the happiness of their loving family.

Kendra takes a very positive approach to her journey living with the Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control. She began her marriage committed to avoiding artificial birth control and discovered that many blessings unfolded in her life as a result of that sustained commitment. Like so many other women, however, Kendra found NFP to be difficult in practice. Due to her irregular cycles, Kendra struggled to identify her fertile period for the purpose of abstaining and preventing pregnancy.⁴³ Ultimately, when Kendra and her husband were unable to postpone pregnancies through NFP, they stopped trying to postpone directly and opted to welcome any children as life-enriching blessings.

Kendra’s experience is, in many ways, a success story. She and her husband had the opportunity to eventually welcome ten children and build a flourishing family.⁴⁴ Her tale is not, however, a success story for NFP. As she makes abundantly clear in her blog post, her happy ending came only as a result of her and her husband’s decision to abandon NFP. Kendra and her husband never had to contradict the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual morality, but they did have to relinquish their desire to exert some control over the spacing and number of their children. Happily, they found much joy in this radical openness, but one must not gloss over the fact that this is not actually what the Catholic Church asks of married couples, particularly those who have discerned—as Kendra and her husband did—that they have “serious reasons” to delay childbearing.⁴⁵ They discovered that they were able to make an extraordinary choice, and this allowed them to abide by the moral teachings to which they were committed. That commitment was certainly part of the picture, but a closer look at Kendra’s story reveals that there were also larger structural forces undergirding her and her husband’s decision to reject NFP in a way that did not violate Catholic sexual ethics. In their case, the specific structural supports of safe housing, an extended family network, and sufficiently lucrative career(s) combined to buoy their commitment to Catholic teaching and create a wide margin for error in the pursuit of responsible parenthood. By attending to these unique features of Kendra’s story, we are better able to identify the enablements and incentives that make it more manageable for couples to adhere to Catholicism’s ban on artificial forms of birth control.

First, safe housing and a supportive community network significantly eased Kendra and her husband’s initial transition to parenthood. At the time, Kendra and her husband were intending to delay pregnancy while he was in graduate school at Stanford University. When things did not go according to plan and they conceived, Kendra left her job as a flight instructor to take care of their son.⁴⁶ Their finances at the time did not leave enormous flexibility, but they were able to live in family housing on Stanford’s campus. Thus, Kendra became a mother in a safe, supportive environment surrounded by other moms and families with small children. This not only helped with her own transition to full-time parenting but also gave her and her family considerable stability.⁴⁷ Significantly, she only had access to this housing and its unique benefits as a result of her husband’s social position at the time. He was a graduate student, enrolled in one of the richest universities in the United States, and this social position created a distinct relationship with Stanford and its subsidiary departments responsible for student well-being. The university had every reason to make housing as attractive as possible for its students because the strongest universities are often competing for the strongest students, and cost of living as well as a safe environment can be a valuable recruitment tool.⁴⁸

By virtue of her husband’s social position as a graduate student who successfully secured admission to one of these topflight schools, Kendra had a unique structural support that is not widely available to first-time mothers in the United States.⁴⁹ Although it certainly did not transform parenthood into an easy task, the safe and secure housing environment removed one major anxiety, freeing Kendra and her husband to welcome their initial unplanned pregnancy even more fully as a gift from God. In this way, housing access cushioned their experience with the unpredictability of NFP and thus became an important enablement supporting their subsequent decision to abandon NFP altogether in favor of an approach to responsible parenthood that sought no direct limits on the number or spacing of their children.

The second structural support enabling Kendra and her husband’s choice was a highly involved extended family network. Kendra writes that she “needed all the help [she] could get” as a new mother, and she indicates that she received a great deal of that help not only from her husband but also from other family members, particularly her mother and mother-in-law.⁵⁰ This is not surprising, as anthropologists argue that the successful evolution of humans depended on a network of “alloparents”—people who provide infant care but who are not an infant’s immediate parents—to ensure comprehensive care for babies without completely exhausting a mother’s or father’s physical and emotional energies. Shaped by this legacy, human babies even today demand more than an individual parent or set of two parents can be expected to provide.⁵¹ Kendra, like all new parents quickly discovered this truth, but unlike many of her peers in Western nations like the United States, she also found that she had the supports to overcome this challenge: her mother and her mother-in-law offered precisely the alloparenting she and her baby needed to thrive.⁵² Without this structure, Kendra and her husband likely could have found other people to augment their own parenting, but in the US context, this almost certainly would have involved market exchange, either through a babysitter, nanny, daycare, or some combination thereof. Given the dramatic expense of childcare, the ready provision of care through Kendra’s extended family network becomes a clear structural enablement facilitating her adherence to the Catholic Church’s prohibition against artificial forms of birth control even when the form of NFP she was using failed.⁵³

Third, Kendra acknowledges that she and her husband benefitted from considerable economic security. Although she does not specify her family’s yearly income or her husband’s salary, she does mention that he was in the Marines, earned a graduate business degree from Stanford, and created a business successful enough to sell, all of which indicate a certain amount of financial stability.⁵⁴ In addition, Kendra notes that despite giving up paid employment when she became a mother, she has since been able to work successfully as a writer, generating additional income for her family.⁵⁵ In response to one reader who commented about the challenging financial struggles many couples have to face when discerning whether they can accept unreliability in their practice of NFP, Kendra explained that she would be willing to make any number of financial sacrifices in order to have a large family, but also indicated that she was quite fortunate that she did not have to do so.⁵⁶ None of this is to say that her journey has been easy, but it is to acknowledge (as she does) that Kendra and her husband had a significant degree of economic security undergirding their decision to abandon NFP without relying on artificial birth control as a replacement. In this way, Kendra’s experience reveals the well-documented fact that access to wealth expands one’s opportunities, underscoring the reality that class functions as a social structure with a meaningful impact on moral agency.⁵⁷ Kendra’s story thus serves as a reminder that Catholic moral theology, especially in its teachings on sexual ethics, needs to account more fully for this dimension.

Ultimately, the financial stability provided by Kendra’s husband’s career combined with her extended family network and helpful housing resources supported her and her husband’s desire to adhere to Catholic teaching. This is not to suggest that her journey was simple, straightforward, or predetermined. Kendra faced significant hurdles to using NFP instead of artificial birth control to postpone pregnancy. She had to contend with irregular cycles and the difficulty of prolonged abstinence that accompanies them. She also supported her husband through cancer treatments while raising small children. Her posture through these ordeals was one of trust in the providence of God, and this is important because another person with the same structural supports could just as easily have made a different decision. Such an acknowledgment, however, does not remove the fact that implicit in her story are significant enablements emerging from her social position that facilitated her commitment to following church teaching. These enablements did not cause her decision—she and her husband still needed to exert their own moral agency—but they did affect her perception of the possibility of adhering to Catholic teaching even when NFP did not work well.

By making these supports explicit, we arrive at a more accurate picture of the challenges involved in embracing the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control, particularly in a US context. Such perspective is important because it highlights the peculiarity of Kendra’s experience, allowing the people of God to avoid idealizing her story in a way that further marginalizes those who struggle to follow Humanae Vitae’s challenging teachings without the structural supports Kendra and her husband enjoyed. It is not merely incidental that couples who use NFP in the United States typically have higher levels of educational attainment and higher incomes than those who abandon the practice and those who never started it.⁵⁸ A careful structural analysis thus reveals that there can be a fine line between God’s providence and a person’s privilege and asks the church to consider what it would mean to promote Catholic morality in a way that encourages reliance on the former without presuming the existence of the latter. Our second story underscores the importance of this distinction and demonstrates that the church still has room to grow in its understanding of the ways its current teachings on sexual ethics can indeed depend on both.

GS’s Story

Much like Kendra’s account, GS’s story became publicly available through a blog post, but in this case GS submitted her story to a series on women’s experience with NFP created by the Women in Theology blog.⁵⁹ Given the contentious nature of the topic and the controversies notoriously fomented by online comment sections, GS’s story was published on the website with simply her (potentially pseudonymous) initials, allowing her to speak more openly about her “real-life experiences with NFP without fear of getting a public internet pounding.”⁶⁰ Her post provides a detailed account of one couple’s painful journey to contraception. Like Kendra’s story, GS’s account reveals the close connection between social structures and sexual ethics, but from the flipside, illustrating how difficult it can be to adhere to the Catholic Church’s official position on birth control in the absence of structural supports.

GS and her husband decided after marrying to use NFP “not to delay pregnancy, but,” in GS’s terms, “just to learn about my body.”⁶¹ GS had trouble getting accurate basal body temperature readings and, like Kendra, she and her husband soon dropped NFP altogether with plans to accept whatever children God gave them. GS became pregnant within the first year of their marriage. After giving birth, she suffered postpartum depression. Relying on breastfeeding to prevent pregnancy, she was pregnant again by the time her infant was six months old. Following the birth of her second child, GS’s postpartum depression and stress increased, and she and her husband took classes to learn NFP in earnest. GS began charting and once again found her cycles to be irregular and confusing. As a result, she and her husband “tossed the charts, and were pregnant again within three weeks. I miscarried. Six months later, we were pregnant again. I miscarried.”⁶²

After giving birth to two children and suffering two miscarriages, GS and her husband decided to learn the Creighton method. They enlisted the help of a Creighton teacher, yet her charts continued to be unreadable. After six abstinence-filled months, they conceived again, and GS carried the child to term. Postpartum depression and financial instability followed. When her third living child was three months old, GS found out she was pregnant. They were in the middle of a major move for the sake of a low-paying job and were in serious financial straits. By that summer, they had become homeless. GS and her children moved one thousand miles away to stay with relatives while her husband worked for low wages. When the family reunited, it was in low-income housing. GS decided to return to school to increase her earning power because “we were on WIC, and I was determined not to become pregnant again because I needed to get that degree to get us out of the low-income housing. Our kids were being exposed to things we never wanted them to be.”⁶³

Still, the couple remained committed to avoiding artificial birth control through the practice of NFP. They worked with another Creighton teacher in an attempt to decipher GS’s confusing cycles. GS’s cycles were very long, requiring many weeks of abstinence and adding strains to their marriage that highlighted the anxieties around pregnancy:

One particularly long cycle, we had abstained for six weeks, and I was certain we were finally safe. We made love that night, and—surprise!—two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test. I cried for two days straight. Several weeks later, I miscarried. I felt nothing but relief and joy—and guilt and sadness for feeling that way.⁶⁴

Then, GS was diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. The couple continued to use the Creighton method, following it strictly because GS now required medicine to manage her illness, and doctors had stressed the importance of avoiding pregnancy while taking those medications. GS and her husband were able to avoid pregnancy for two years in this manner while she progressed through her degree program, but they conceived again and she gave birth to a fifth child near the end of her studies. She was hospitalized soon thereafter as a result of declining health due to caring for a newborn while doing clinical rotations and managing a chronic illness. The couple continued NFP but “always with long periods of abstinence and frequent falls into ‘sin.’”⁶⁵

GS grew increasingly angry with God, the church, and NFP. Though she began a successful career, she “found it harder and harder to believe that the life we were living as a couple was the kind of life God intended for couples to live.”⁶⁶ She experienced another unintended pregnancy and another miscarriage. A sixth unintended pregnancy was carried to term, greatly complicated by her medical condition. After the birth of their sixth child, GS’s husband informed her that he was having a vasectomy. They talked at length about the morality of the procedure and GS repeatedly emphasized she did not want him to feel pressured into violating church teaching. He decided to have the procedure, confess it, and abandon himself to God’s mercy. GS confessed as well, stating her only reason for confession was fear of hell. She was absolved and told to be at peace. GS concludes: “I have nothing but admiration for those couples who really do love NFP and find it wonderful and healthy for their relationships. I wanted and planned to be just like them! But I failed utterly in that department and will have to face God for it on judgment day.”⁶⁷

GS’s commitment to avoiding artificial birth control was frustrated by restrictive forces beyond her control.⁶⁸ Consequently, when symptothermal NFP failed for GS, as it did for Kendra, and she likewise found it necessary to accept more unexpected pregnancies, she became overwhelmed by the hardships accompanying her choice instead of discovering the joy Kendra and her husband found. The difference is, in large part, a result of Kendra’s and GS’s differing social positions, which afforded Kendra access to certain enablements and left GS with challenging restrictions. Lacking the social enablements that Kendra enjoyed, GS and her husband ultimately chose to stop living out their faith in the way they had hoped. By evaluating the same three structural supports that served as enablements in Kendra’s case, one can more clearly see in GS’s story how the absence of these structures can turn into a significant restriction affecting moral agency. Revealing the inverse of Kendra’s experience, GS’s account thus bolsters the argument that Catholic sexual ethics—particularly the discussion of birth control—must better account for the social dimensions shaping the laity’s ability to flourish while following official teaching.

To begin, GS’s story demonstrates that she and her husband had legitimate reasons to postpone pregnancy. When they got married, they were open to a pregnancy as Catholic teaching requires and the matrimonial rite reminds.⁶⁹ In fact, they were not initially seeking to delay childbirth at all, so the difficulties of NFP were minor inconveniences because they “just figured they would accept children as they came.”⁷⁰ GS suffered postpartum depression, however, leading her and her husband to determine that they needed to be much more vigilant about avoiding pregnancy. This determination is in line with the magisterium’s description of the need to evaluate not only “physical, economic … and social conditions” but also “psychological” ones in a couple’s discernment of their call to responsible parenthood.⁷¹ Later, when GS was subsequently diagnosed with a chronic illness that required medical management and ultimately hospitalization, it added another rationale for delaying pregnancy that likewise fit clearly within the magisterium’s parameters. When GS and her husband sought to use NFP as a means of postponing conception, then, they were taking the demands of responsible parenthood seriously and showing deep respect for the Catholic Church’s official teachings. Their efforts to follow this plan, however, were thwarted by significant structural restrictions that made it much more difficult for GS and her husband to take Kendra’s approach of abandoning NFP and forgoing intentional efforts to space children.

First, GS indicates that adequate housing was a true obstacle to accepting a growing family. The issue was not a matter of space but safety, most especially the psychological safety that allows children to preserve their innocence. This is the challenge contained in GS’s concern that her children “were being exposed to things we never wanted them to [see]” while they were living in low-income housing.⁷² For parents, the desire to shield one’s children from psychological trauma is a natural and consequential instinct. Child development research indicates “that prolonged exposure to traumatic events can be toxic to the developing brain and lead to lifelong problems, including difficulty learning, depressive disorders, behavioral dysregulation, psychosis, and physical health problems (e.g., alcoholism and drug abuse).”⁷³ Significantly, “the first few years of life are a period in which young children are particularly susceptible to trauma” because the negative effects can compound over time.⁷⁴ A stable homelife and secure environment are thus essential to the healthy development of children, but GS and her husband discovered that access to this basic need varies greatly by social position in the United States. Obviously, they had access to government-subsidized housing, which should have been an effective structural support for young families. The problem, however, is that this kind of subsidized housing has not been crafted to serve as an enablement.

Due to policy decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s (many of which were tainted by reactionary attempts to enforce racial segregation), public housing in the United States has been intentionally restricted in a fashion that “transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor” without the communal support “to make public housing a decent place to live.”⁷⁵ GS and her husband experienced this legacy of disinvestment, and their access to public housing became a restriction constraining their agency rather than an enablement supporting it. The contrast with Kendra and her husband, who benefitted from a different kind of subsidized housing, can be traced to the causal power found in the relation between social positions. Occupying the social position of a graduate student at an elite school, Kendra’s husband was understood to have “earned” his access to graduate student housing, which provided a safe and secure environment complete with a supportive community to facilitate his and Kendra’s transition to parenthood. GS and her husband, meanwhile, languished in the type of subsidized housing that most communities only tolerate under the assumption that the people whose need is dire enough to rely on a government “handout” should be grateful for whatever they can get. Heavily coded in relation to larger debates about the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, Kendra’s and GS’s opposite experiences with different forms of subsidized housing reveal the influence of social position on access to the safe and secure environment children need to develop well.⁷⁶ The ability to provide this support for a newborn is thus not merely a matter of personal decisions over which an individual agent has complete control; there is a decidedly structural dimension that affects the range of options realistically open to a couple discerning responsible parenthood.

Second, GS and her husband did not have the support of an extended family network in their immediate geographic vicinity. Although this might appear to reflect an unfortunate accident of circumstance, there are structural dimensions to this restriction as well. GS and her husband had an invested extended family network, but they could not rely upon it because their pursuit of employment opportunities removed them from their circle of kin. The need to make this kind of move, though, reflects broader structural trends. Specifically, the increasingly neoliberal nature of US capitalism has made jobs ever more contingent, leaving economists to argue that geographic mobility is the key to economic opportunity and a quintessential element of the US economic model.⁷⁷ In this context, it is not surprising that GS and her husband made a dramatic move even though it severed their family connections. When they discovered that even this move did not provide the economic security they sought, GS and her children moved again to seek family support, separating a wife from her husband and children from their father in a manner that makes it very difficult for parents to fulfill their obligations to cultivate a “domestic church” through their “togetherness.”⁷⁸ The lack of easy access to familial support—a challenge affected by structural features of the US economic model—thus added considerable stress to GS’s marriage, limiting her and her husband’s ability to feel as though they could manage another unexpected pregnancy should NFP continue to fail.

Finally, GS and her husband found that their structural restrictions were exacerbated by their lack of financial resources. Without the graduate degree from an elite institution that aided Kendra’s husband access to a lucrative career path, GS and her husband struggled financially, especially during the years when they first encountered the limits of NFP. GS was thus motivated to return to school in the hopes of gaining the credentials—and social position—she needed to secure a higher-paying job and accompanying pathway out of low-income housing for her growing family. Given that wealth and income are closely tied to ancestry in the United States today, there are certainly structural features to GS’s experience of limited economic opportunity.⁷⁹ At the same time, GS’s story reveals how the absence of wealth is itself a structural force defining the relation between social positions in a way that leaves those who are poorer with fewer opportunities than those who are richer, particularly when it comes to the expensive task of raising children in the United States.⁸⁰ For GS and her husband, limited financial resources were thus a powerful restriction limiting their confidence in their ability to manage the unpredictability that they had found so unavoidable with NFP. It was therefore an influential factor in their determination that they had no viable options apart from violating the Catholic Church’s prohibition on artificial forms of birth control.

Together with Kendra’s story, GS’s experience demonstrates that structural factors can dramatically influence a couple’s journey with NFP and, by extension, their fidelity to Catholic sexual ethics.⁸¹ Especially when the practice of NFP itself becomes difficult to maintain—as it often does for even the most dedicated and well-intentioned couples—the extent to which one’s social position affords access to the structural supports of safe housing, an extended family network, and financial security can have a dramatic effect on whether adherence to magisterial teaching appears as a viable option. For those, like Kendra, who are fortunate enough to experience these structural supports as enablements that will soften the challenges of raising additional children, alignment with Catholic sexual ethics will seem like a feasible or even attractive possibility. For those, like GS, who experience the lack of these structural supports as a genuine restriction, however, the church’s vision will look far less attainable. Of course, this does not diminish the role free will plays in the process. Moral agents benefitting from structural enablements could still choose to reject Catholic teaching, and those who face structural restrictions could still find ways to embrace it. Nevertheless, one set of circumstances supports a couple’s desire to follow the dictates of their faith while the other actively undermines it because the costs of adherence are dramatically different. If the Catholic Church is serious that its teachings represent the “true nature and nobility” of married love,⁸² then the people of God must take it upon themselves to address this gap, for it would be a violation of solidarity and the preferential option for the poor to accept that this holy ideal should be easily accessible only to the privileged few while remaining all but impossible for the marginalized.⁸³ Building on the diverging experiences of Kendra and GS, then, we close with a brief discussion of three structural reforms that might transform some of the current restrictions into genuine enablements for more couples seeking to realize the Catholic Church’s vision of married sexuality. Consistent with Pope Francis’s assertion that pastoral solutions should be tailored to a particular “culture and sensisitve to its traditions and local needs,” these reforms are US-specific, even as they may have practical implications for other contexts.⁸⁴

Structural Reforms: Combining Catholic Social Teaching and Catholic Sexual Ethics

The first reform to explore is one that would address the challenges around housing. Catholic social teaching has long argued that adequate shelter is due, as a matter of justice, to each human person.⁸⁵ This has made housing an essential concern of the state, which must consider access to dignified housing as part of its responsibilities to promote the common good.⁸⁶ As Kendra’s and GS’s stories indicate, access to safe housing is a serious concern for parents, and lack of adequate housing can negatively affect a couple’s openness to NFP. A significant part of the challenge is the lack of affordable housing in the United States, a problem that the US Catholic Bishops highlighted in their 1987 pastoral letter on the US economy and that has only been exacerbated in the intervening years.⁸⁷ As researchers are quick to point out, government policies have a dramatic effect on these shortages.⁸⁸ This fact, combined with Catholicism’s vision of the state’s responsibilities in relation to housing, gives Catholics every reason to champion policy changes that would redress the housing shortages, shifting the structural restrictions and enablements around housing that currently affect couples’ abilities to practice their faith in marital life. One of these changes would be to support zoning updates that would dismantle some of the stringent density restrictions that limit the construction of new homes and rentals in “desirable” areas. As David Cloutier points out, this act of solidarity would be reflective of some of Catholicism’s most authoritative teachings on the role of the family in society, and, as we have shown from Kendra’s and GS’s examples, it would help more Catholic families realize their vocations as well.⁸⁹

On the level of macro policy reforms, Catholics could also advocate for a shift in public housing strategy in the United States. In previous generations, when the nation faced a housing crunch, public housing was deployed as a tool to address the needs of all.⁹⁰ Opposition from real estate lobbyists, however, led to the decision that government involvement in the housing market should be limited to income-restricted projects. As a result, “the condition of public projects rapidly deteriorated, partly because housing authority maintenance workers and their families had to leave the buildings where they worked when their wages [suddenly] made them ineligible to live there.”⁹¹ Although a shift toward income-restricted housing might seem consonant with the Catholic Church’s promotion of the preferential option for the poor, that principle is grounded in the pursuit of solidarity between the marginalized and those who have more access to a society’s resources and advantages.⁹² The history of housing policy in the United States demonstrates that these restrictions have been inimical to that spirit of cooperation and have served instead to further alienate those in poverty. If Catholics were to take the initiative in promoting a return to a public housing strategy that facilitated the integration of low- and middle-income families into middle- and upper-income areas, then, they could have a profound effect on both the perception of public housing and the opportunities available to those who live there. This would reflect the true preferential option for the poor advocated in Catholic social teaching and chip away at one of the structural burdens making Catholic sexual ethics appear like it is the exclusive purview of the privileged few.

The second area in which structural reforms could significantly shift couples’ perceptions of the viability of Catholic sexual ethics is childcare. For both Kendra and GS, access to some form of support for childcare (specifically, extended family members) was a central deciding factor in their discernment about whether they needed to rely on other forms of contraception after their versions of NFP proved inadequate. Their experiences reflect not only the natural human need for alloparents to support childrearing but also the collapse of the informal community networks that used to provide such assistance. In the United States’ increasingly individualistic cultural context, the assumption has become that every parent must forge these bonds for himself or herself, and children now benefit or suffer according to the social and economic capital of their parents and not the resources of their community as a whole.⁹³

For Catholics sincerely concerned about the practical attainability of their church’s vision for sexual morality, this uneven situation demands a response. On a personal level, Catholics could look for ways to create new alloparenting opportunities within their existing social networks, thereby taking steps to counteract the disintegration of community bonds with a renewed form of solidarity.⁹⁴ To give just one such example, a babysitting cooperative, or other openness to watching friends’ or neighbors’ children on a semi-regular basis without the expectation of remuneration, would address the real challenges of childcare while simultaneously reintroducing the Catholic “principle of generosity and the logic of gift … [in] normal economic activity,” as Pope Benedict encouraged.⁹⁵ On the social level, meanwhile, Catholics could also respond to this need by appealing to an idea regularly cited in Catholic social teaching: subsidized support for families, which parents could use either to pay for childcare or to free one of the parents to stay at home during those intense infant years.⁹⁶ Although not as radical, because this approach still seeks alloparents through the market, subsidies nevertheless offer an immediate opportunity to find childcare within the existing cultural assumptions and therefore represent an important part of the solution to this second structural obstacle.

The third structural element shaping Kendra’s and GS’s divergent experiences was access to economic resources. In this area, a policy long-championed by Catholic social teaching—the family living wage—can introduce a new structural enablement with the potential to impact economic security, housing, childcare, and even the effectiveness of NFP itself.⁹⁷ Laborem Exercens notes that “work is a condition for making it possible to found a family, since the family requires the means of subsistence which [is normally gained] through work.”⁹⁸ Yet in GS’s case, even a cross-country move could not ensure that her husband would find adequate work to support their growing family. This is due to the absence of a “family wage,” which Laborem Exercens argues must “suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future.”⁹⁹ Indeed, Catholic social teaching argues that a family wage must provide for more than the everyday necessities of family life. It must also be sufficient to allow the family to build up enough savings to buy property, which will allow the family to preserve its freedom through the stability and resiliency that property ownership brings.¹⁰⁰

Catholic advocacy for a family living wage should focus on making sure that unskilled laborers, the poor, and the working poor have as much access to family life as the members of other social classes. The requirements of justice go beyond the minimum wage necessary for a family’s physical survival; Catholics must advocate for a family living wage sufficient to make property ownership a feasible goal for all families. As long as the minimum wage is insufficient to support a family, families like GS’s will find the choice to follow church teaching by forgoing artificial birth control an oppressively burdensome, or even life threatening, decision. A legal minimum wage floor set at the level required to meet the actual needs of raising a family, however, would give all married couples greater freedom to pursue the Catholic vision for married love without the anxieties that often surround the use of NFP when financial resources are tight. If further augmented by the state support for the “remuneration for domestic work” advanced in Catholic social teaching’s promotion of family allowances, the family living wage floor could thus create a significant enablement dismantling the structural stresses that currently leave many Catholic couples questioning their ability to embrace Catholic sexual ethics.¹⁰¹

Finally, an important part of economic security for Catholics seeking to practice NFP is access to the forms of NFP that work best for each particular couple. Both Kendra and GS struggled to track ovulation due to their irregular cycles. Unfortunately for GS, the forms of NFP that are most effective for irregular cycles are also the most expensive.¹⁰² Meanwhile, most health insurance policies are now legally required to cover artificial birth control for free but can choose not to cover the fertility monitors or test strips used in the more high-tech forms of NFP.¹⁰³ Consequently, someone like GS who is experiencing both economic insecurity and irregular cycles will likely find that avoiding artificial birth control becomes prohibitively costly. Thus, economic reforms like a universal family living wage can serve as a structural enablement empowering couples to follow the teachings of their faith in more than one way.¹⁰⁴ Not only will they alleviate some of the stress surrounding the prospect of an additional pregnancy when resources are tight, but they will also give couples more options to choose the most effective form of NFP, allowing those couples who have discerned that they must postpone childbirth to achieve the aims of responsible parenthood more securely.¹⁰⁵

Conclusion

The Catholic Church has remained adamant in its prohibition of artificial birth control despite near-universal acceptance by other Christian traditions. As a result of the widespread embrace of artificial forms of birth control, the contemporary cultural context in Western countries such as the United States is not designed to promote Catholic practice. Instead, structural constraints significantly complicate the observance of these Catholic norms, undermining access to the myriad goods that the Catholic tradition associates with its vision for marital sexuality. Although structural constraints do not deprive Catholics of their freedom to choose to eschew artificial birth control, they do affect how practicable these teachings seem as well as the personal and social costs associated with observing them. As the examination of Kendra’s and GS’s stories showed, even Catholics who are deeply committed to practicing responsible parenthood exclusively through the church’s only approved form of birth regulation run into serious obstacles in practice.

The Catholic Church, understood comprehensively as the people and not just the institution, must take these challenges more seriously and tackle them more directly, both to strengthen the credibility of their tradition’s teachings and to demonstrate that this community of faith is genuinely committed to the compassionate accompaniment exhorted in the gospels.¹⁰⁶ The best way to do this is to underscore the intrinsic relationship between Catholic sexual ethics and Catholic social ethics because the same reforms around housing, family assistance, and living wages advocated in Catholic social teaching are the ones most needed to shift the structural constraints affecting the perceived viability of the Catholic vision for responsible parenthood. To achieve this end, however, significant steps are needed at the parish level. Parish catechesis needs to make the currently implicit relationship between Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual ethics more explicit, reinforcing the idea that they do not operate on separate planes but rather form a unified vision for the moral life. Likewise, catechetical presentations of the church’s teaching on sexual morality, and especially NFP, must help parishioners appreciate the uneven structural enablements and restrictions shaping fidelity to these teachings.¹⁰⁷ For the middle- and upper-income parishioners who experience more enablements, these discussions should strive to elicit their support for structural reforms designed to build a world in which their enablements are shared by all. For those parishioners who face serious obstacles to living their faith in this area, meanwhile, parishes should make it a priority to help them access forms of NFP that will be most effective for them, something they might achieve by creating a parish or diocesan fund not only for training but also for the technology and materials that might be necessary.

Ultimately, the Catholic Church has work to do if it wishes to present its positive vision for the fullness of human sexuality as anything more than an idealized abstraction. Given the structural enablements behind many of the “success” stories of couples who managed to remain faithful to magisterial teaching, it is hardly surprising that data indicate US Catholic women rely on artificial forms of birth control much more than NFP when they recognize a need to space or prevent births.¹⁰⁸ If the Catholic Church in the United States sincerely wants to change this trajectory, then all its members will need to recognize their responsibility to work for the structural reforms championed in Catholic social teaching. Only by tackling structural constraints can the Catholic Church contribute to a world where following Catholic teaching can become less economically costly and less physically and emotionally dangerous and thus, by extension, more common. Without these reforms, even the Catholic couples most dedicated to their church’s official teachings will continue to be “tormented by difficulties of every kind,” and the Catholic vision for the fullness of marriage and family life will remain a distant hope for far too many.