Our People

The pastoral application of the theology of the body

Centrecare Natural Family Planning Conference , Randwick

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
23 October 2004

Those who practice the art and science, philosophy and theology of NFP today do not do so in a vacuum. We are the children of our age and however aware or unaware, critical or uncritical we might be of the assumptions of our age, we cannot but be affected by them. To highlight just a few aspects of the backdrop for NFP today…

Many modern developments in understandings of marriage, family and sexuality have been overwhelmingly positive. Popular understanding of the dignity and rights of women and children, of the importance of intimacy (as well as creativity) in marital life, and of the responsibilities of couples (including what has been called ‘responsible parenthood) have all accelerated. The Judeo-Christian tradition from the Genesis of the Old Testament, through the New Testament, the Fathers and Scholastics, right up to Paul VI^[1] has been enormously enriched in the past three decades by a number of thinkers, led by Pope John Paul II. In his series of Wednesday audiences from September 1979 to November 1984 now collected together as The Theology of the Body^[2], and in many other places, he has proposed really Good News about sexuality in a thoroughly contemporary language. In the same period the science of human fertility and infertility and the art of NFP, including several now highly successful methods, have made enormous leaps forward.

Nonetheless, legal and cultural developments in understanding of sexuality, marriage and family in this same period have been far from uniformly progress. To give just a few examples: despite all the furore over sex abuse in recent years, an American judge recently held that mandatory reporting of sexual abuse of minors was unconstitutional because children have a right to sexual self-expression and to privacy^[3]. And lest we think such madness only possible on the other side of the Pacific, consider the hysterical reaction from some medical, academic and political leaders when the Federal Health Minister earlier this year suggested that parents should be privy to information about their children’s medications and operations—including, of course, family planning. While doctors who clandestinely cooperate in under-aged sex can apparently be trusted to have their underaged patients’ best interests at heart, the media-honoured sexperts implied that benighted parents are best kept in the dark lest they drive their children to suicide^[4]. All around us sex is exploited for profit or recreation: we need only glance at the billboards or the late night ads or the internet bombardment with Viagra ads and girlie pictures. Just how far we have gone with the sexual free-for-all is perhaps best demonstrated in the writing of our best know Pacific-hopping philosopher, Peter Singer, in favour of sex with domestic pets^[5].

While sex rates are on the up-and-up, marriage rates have hit an all-time low, with fewer and fewer people marrying at al^[6]l. This is despite the fact that in addition to traditional man-and-woman marriage, many parts of North America and Northern Europe now allow people to marry others of the same sex^[7], Australia allows transsexuals to marry people of either sex^[8] and France allows live people to marry dead people^[9]. With serial polygamy widespread for so long, concurrent polygamy is surely around the corner^[10]. And nowadays marriage, though still promised ‘until death do us part’ need no longer last more than a year, after which its extension is effectively optional in many jurisdictions such as Australia.

Despite all the varieties of marriage and the sheer quantity of sex inside and out of it, as well as the availability of new artificial reproductive technologies to secure children for everyone from the post-menopausal to singles and gay couples to grieving widows who want a child by their deceased spouse, birth rates are in free fall in most Western countries, well below demographic replacement level^[11]. Many of those now getting married decide from the beginning to have no children or at most one. Pregnancy rates remain surprisingly high, despite widespread sex-education, contraception and infertility. Abortion is what keeps down the birthrate and so no real brakes have been put on that practice for decades.

Abortifacient drugs are the latest measure to keep abortion on the up-and-up. Oddly, if you want a mild dose of Postinor-2 to take as a contraceptive, you still need a prescription: but if you multiply the dose several times, to levels thought risky for some women and deadly for any already-conceived children, you can get it over-the-counter in a pharmacy. The Federal Health Minister caused a furore before the election when he modestly suggested requiring medical advice before giving out such potent drugs. He was concerned that girls as young as 13 may get the drug with little or no information or supervision. Sydney’s Sun Herald had reported that pharmacies cannot or do not provide the expected counselling and that, in at least one case, a cosmetician was dispensing it!^[12] But the states refused to reschedule the drug. Behind the campaign for ready access to so-called ‘emergency’ contraception is the notion that new children are intruders, the enemy, something nasty to be warded off at all costs, even with hazardous drugs. Their appearance—indeed the very thought of them—sounds emergency alarm bells. Instead of being socialised to love our lives, our marriages and our children we are increasingly being taught by our culture to fear our fertility, to withhold it even from our spouses, to drug-bomb it out of existence. Instead of being encouraged to be generous toward the future, we are rewarded for living only for today. The Western world is becoming sterile in the process and it is doing its level best to infect the rest of the world with a similar infertility.

In such a world some do of course still have children. Yet all too often it would seem to be as a kind of life-style project, and then only with the aid of considerable technology, first to avoid and later to achieve conception, as well as to quality test along the way^[13]. No-one is immune to this cultural and moral revolution, and NFP teachers must be on their guard lest they find themselves infected by or complicit in, for instance, the child-as-emergency or the child-as-life-style-project approaches to fertility. Likewise we must be aware that while there are some aspects of contemporary understanding of the human person, sexuality, marriage and the family on which we can build, in many respects NFP offers a counter-wisdom to that of the world and requires a kind of heroism on the part its users. I will come back to this later.

2. We are our bodies
In a previous talk to this organisation I outlined some of the central features of the Judeo-Christian and especially the Catholic magisterial theology of the body^[14]. That has been published in The Natural News and so I need not rehearse it here. But in that talk I sought to offer a practical application of that rich theology by suggesting the kind of accessible language in which it might be expounded to ordinary people. How, for instance, might you explain to someone today what is wrong with contraception and right with natural family planning? Aren’t they just two methods of achieving the same end, like GIFT is Catholic IVF and annulment is Catholic divorce? If it is alright to use NFP to postpone children indefinitely, isn’t it alright to use a condom just to be sure? Couldn’t I use contraception from time to time in a relationship which is – overall – pro-children? Couldn’t I engage in contraceptive acts without adopting a contraceptive mindset? What are we to say to people who find the method difficult or a spouse unco-operative? What if the very times we want to have sex are when we are fertile? Should we co-operate with people who want to use NFP for entirely selfish or otherwise immoral purposes? While in that earlier talk I did not offer detailed answers to all these questions I tried to suggest some ways we might approach them. In particular I suggested that we must begin by explaining to people that we are our bodies; that what we do with our bodies affects who we are; that what we do with our bodies says something; and that we need to develop the qualities of character that allow us to say what we mean and mean what we say with sex.

But why bother with all this philosophical and theological explanation? Isn’t it enough that some people will, for their own reasons such as religious faith, secular convenience, or whatever, choose NFP? We offer a service, which we are convinced is good in itself, and it is none of our business why people want it just as it is not their business why we offer it. I think this will not do. For one thing it will not sustain us in our activity. If NFP is part of the mission of the Church and of her members, it will not satisfy us for long just to tell ourselves that it is efficient and effective. At some level we want to know ‘efficient and effective at doing what?’ We want to know why it matters if we are going to give it passion and energy and make it part of the bigger picture of our lives.

If that is so for teachers it is also so for NFP users. Acknowledging the strong cultural forces I mentioned which make the very notion of periodic abstinence unthinkable for some couples, when we come across couples who are willing to consider NFP, we need to be able to explain the why behind what the Church teaches. We can of course, legitimately speak of the ‘advantages’ of using natural methods in terms of benefits to women’s health, benefits to relationships such as improving communication, that ‘less can be more’ and so on. This approach can be of tremendous value in ‘marketing’ NFP, in ‘mainstreaming’ it, in catching couples’ attention, shattering stereotypes, and helping them to live it. But even if we talk convincingly of ‘practical’ advantages, many couples will still ask: why is it good, in and of itself, to avoid contraception and practice NFP? Why is the Church so hung up on this issue? It must be more than a concern for women’s health! Catholics, in particular, are likely to be suspicious of any explanation which seems to evade the immorality of contraception. Unfortunately many young Catholics will have grown up in families, or attended schools and parishes, where no one really knew how to answer questions about contraception. This led to the idea that its not just a difficult teaching to follow, but that it actually doesn’t make any sense! So choose for yourself whether you are going to follow it: its just one of those quirky Catholic club rules.

My thought here is that it we spend too long skirting around the moral dimension of family planning, we risk loosing people by reinforcing their suspicion that there are in fact no good reasons for the Church’s teaching. This risk could be as great, if not greater, than the risk of ‘scaring them away’ by proposing an approach to sexuality which calls too quickly and immediately for heroic self-giving and self-sacrifice. “Give me a reason… Don’t just tell me that we shouldn’t separate the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act, whatever that means. Tell me why I shouldn’t. And tell why on earth you think there is any moral—as opposed to strategic—difference between your method of family planning and the one my doctor prefers!”

I usually begin my explanation of the theology of the body by explaining how essential to us the body is. Bodies are not just extrinsic instruments, like costumes or prisons or pieces of machinery dressing or caging or for the use of some internal ‘real me’. It is impossible to touch and be touched, be hugged, have sex, have the range of tactile and sensuous experiences, just as bodies and not be affected personally. I think many people in our culture, including many pious Christians are at heart deeply dualist and see their bodies (and therefore whatever they do in and through and with their bodies) as somehow disjunct from who they are. So an immediate ‘pastoral’ challenge for the NFP teacher is to help people see that they are a unity of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual elements, and that like all animals, we are our bodies. None of which is to deny, of course, that we are rather special animals: free, rational, self-conscious, loving beings… images and children of God the Father, siblings of God the Son, temples of God the Holy Spirit, destined to eternal life with the saints. Were we not such being we would not even have choices to make about what we do with our bodies. Yet however ‘spiritual’ we are, certain bodily things always bring us back down to earth.

In my own presentation of the theology of the body I then go on to explain how gender is one of those bodily givens: not just an optional extra, added on to an otherwise asexual being, but something essential that goes to the very depths of our being and identity, permeating and colouring our activities and relationships. And our sexual differences point to another crucial fact about us: that we are made for love, indeed for loving someone of the opposite sex; that love is our origin, vocation and destiny. From Adam’s yearning for and exclamation on meeting Eve through to John Paul II’s exploration of ‘the nuptial meaning of the body’ Jews, Christians and others have seen that this is central to understanding sexuality. The sexes are similar, yet different, hopefully in complementary ways; they are made for, structured to each other; and this reciprocity is very good. Sexuality, we must insist, is part of our design make-up given by God and so faith invites not hostility to our bodies and sexuality (as so much even of the highly sexualised world around us does in fact), not less and guiltier sex, but more and better sex. Part of the mission of NFP is to convey these themes in very practical ways.

There is a risk that the theology of the body can romanticize sexuality. The fact is that we are complex – and according to our faith tradition – broken beings. ‘Original sin’ has disintegrated us at many levels. The power of Christ’s grace has begun the long process of our healing, reintegration, redemption. But in the meantime, as we make our pilgrimage through this life, we continue to live with the complexities and consequences of our good but damaged natures, capable of so much, yet weak and confused at times. We need to explore anew not just what we are in our created natures but what we are for. And in that process we can lead couples to understand their fertility not just as a biological function requiring taming, but as an essential aspect of who they are with a meaning and significance inscribed on their persons.

3. We are what we do with our bodies
That leads me to the next theme that I think we must explore with those we are educating about their bodies: that we are what we do and what we say with our bodies. The self-creative and self-expressive aspects of human choices mean that no sexual activity can be trivial. Some things such as love-giving in friendship and marriage, life-giving in parenting and nurturing, truth-telling in communication, and so on, are essential to human flourishing. We don’t choose these values, they choose us, as it were. Ethics, on this view, not some grumpy politician, policeman or judge, telling us to do what we’d rather not: it is simply the pattern for living ‘the good life’, a reasonable life, a life that will, whatever hardships it involves, ensure our ultimate fulfilment. It is, in a sense, what we really want to do, deep down beyond the social fashions and the passing personal whimsy.

The body language of human sexuality tells an important part of our story. Sexual intimacy can be a beautiful form of human expression in which each explores the other emotionally and physically, forming a special bond of trust, wantedness and love. We can say with sex honestly, “I love you, I give you myself completely, as I am; I let you see me, as I am; I invite you to be part of me; I trust you not to hurt me”. Sex can unite in conversation, communicate feelings, hopes and promises, tell a love story, a life story, be an experience of union and transcendence.

But sex can also cloud thinking, become self-centred, exploitative, manipulative, oppressive, humiliating, obsessive, even violent. We can lie with sex, saying “I love you, I give you myself completely”, but with our fingers crossed, really meaning “just while its fun” or “just for tonight” or “as long as it gives me pleasure”. It is can be a specially powerful kind of lie, told with the whole person, physically and emotionally. Thus the sexual language can be an occasion for, a means to, and an expression of the most noble and other-directed side of our nature. On the other hand, it can be used to tell a lie, allowing or excusing using another person to masturbate in or with. In the process we debase our sexual language, devalue the currency of sex, and underestimate its power.

I and many others have explored these claims more fully elsewhere. Suffice it for now to observe that amongst the practical implications of this understanding of human choice is that each and every sexual choice matters. We cannot use contraception from time to time in a relationship which is – ‘overall’ – pro-children, any more than we can use abortion from time to time in a life which is – ‘overall’ – pro-life. It is not really possible for a couple to be ‘open to children’ over the course of their marriage, while deliberately making some of their sexual acts closed to children. We cannot contradict the language of love in our particular choices while trying to tell a love-story over a life time.As Christopher West has put it “When couples choose to ‘speak’ (through intercourse), they must speak the truth. If they have a good reason not to ‘speak’, it’s good to remain silent. But nothing justifies speaking a lie…”.^[15] Our actions make us into particular kinds of spouses and persons and declare to ourselves, each other and the world our ‘personview’ as I called it at the beginning of this paper.

It is of course at this point that the theology of the body starts to have bite for people. No-one doubts that bodily, sexual self-giving can be ‘making love’: a choice of the good of friendship, of giving and receiving love, of being united with another person. Uniquely among forms of communication it can constitute us as ‘lovers’ in our identity, relationships and destiny. No-one doubts that bodily, sexual self-giving can be ‘making life’: a choice of the good of parenting, of giving and receiving new life, to the other and from the other and through the other. Uniquely among forms of communication, it can constitute us as potential parents in our identity, relationships and destiny. Sex is, in fact, the only kind of conversation, language, touching, which both unites people ‘as one flesh’ and also gives life to a new human person. By its strange mathematics one plus one equals one; and then one plus one equals three.

Now it can mean these things: but does it have to? Part of the mission of NFP is I think to help people in coming to see their bodies as themselves and their bodily sexual choices as constitutive of themselves and communicative to others to see in turn that sex means life and love, sex says life and love, and we cannot make it mean just whatever we choose without abusing ourselves and each other, without lying to ourselves and each other. Sex which does not say love and life is not good sex, not reasonable sex, not honest sex; if we seek to exclude either, by damaging our bodies or our sexual acts, permanently or temporarily, we are having sex ‘with our fingers crossed’. So too when we engage in unloving intercourse with our spouse, or fornication or adultery with someone who is not our spouse …

Which beings me to another challenge for NFP teachers. Christian faith and experience teach that the full expression of sexual love is when a married couple give themselves to each other honestly and completely. Sex, which says life and love, says what marriage says; indeed sex says marriage. Any other use of sexuality is a diminishment, impoverishment, debasement of the sexual language, at most imitating marital sexual love, but in the process demeaning both marriage and the persons themselves, their faculties and language. And for NFP teachers this raises the difficult questions: should I ever, and if so how and when, be complicit in someone’s misuse of their sexuality, their non-marital use of it, but offering them a method which in their mind, not mine, is merely a more convenient harm-minimisation technique? Should I ever refer them to someone else who may encourage or enable them to engage in contraception or, worse, abortion? What if they offer me very serious reasons, like danger to their health or marriage? For the reasons outlined already and elsewhere I think we must be very reluctant even to cooperate even materially in extra-marital sex, contraception, sterilisation or abortion, and we must be ready and willing to refuse to be formally part of such choices. But I do not think that a courageous No is enough. We must have some positive alternative to offer people who are struggling to live the NFP way.

4. The struggle of NFP
In my previous lecture I talked about the meaning of chastity and how we have to present it positively to people as a virtue which heightens, liberates and integrates our sensuality, passions, emotions, affections, sexual desires. It means that we say what we mean and mean what we say with sex. It integrates it with the rest of our personality, life-plan, vocation. It enables us to temper and direct sexual passion so that we are the kinds of sexual persons we could and should be: tender, warm, affectionate; passionate without being brutal, self-expressive without being exploitative, strong yet gentle, serving rather than harming the other. Despite all the talk in our highly sexualised culture, people know that thewy do not need to have sex all the time; that frequency and spontaneity are not everything. If you get the urge but are in the shopping centre, or church, or at Mum’s, you must abstain, for a time. If you get the urge and you have visitors and the walls are paper thin, you might have to wait. If one of you is sick or grumpy or overseas, sex won’t be quite as frequent or spontaneous as you might want.

This points a way into explaining the difference between contraception and NFP. Are the couple who decide not to have sex while others are watching contracepting? No, yet they are abstaining. People have no duty to have sex all the time; indeed they have a duty to decide when and where and how and with whom it is appropriate. NFP is simply part of that picture, and it is very different to saying: “hell, I don’t care about the when and where and how and with whom that sex is appropriate: I want it now and with no complications, so I’ll take a drug or use a device to sterilised myself or my acts…”. Of course, it is possible that people will use NFP with much the same mindset. While strictly speaking they are not using NFP contraceptively – since contraception is doing something to yourself or your acts so as to have sterile sex – nonetheless the same selfishness or bad attitudes to the body or sexuality may be involved… But I divert. My point here is that there can be good reasons not to have sex, even for extended periods, even with your spouse and even when you have the desire, and the important thing in those circumstances is to find ways of dealing with that and keeping true to yourself and your love for each other.

Yet no-one should pretend that is easy. Those on NFP face temptations against chastity as much as anyone else. They face the same challenge to integrate their sexuality into their married and parental love. Undoubtedly for many of them this involves a constant struggle against desire and habit—a struggle that may often seem hopeless, even pointless. They may report to us that they feel their greatest sexual desire exactly when the method tells them not to have sex. Or that they only have ‘shore leave’ when they are fertile. Or that the emotional-psychological costs for them of being faithful to NFP (sexual frustration, fears of rejection, fears of growing apart, anxiety about method failure…) are considerable.^[16] Or that they fear that abstinence will hurt them or each other or their love. Or that it is bringing temptations against their marriage… All of which we must take seriously, even if some people are inclined to blame NFP for personal or relational problems they would have in any case. Rather than underestimating the difficulties of NFP so as to sell the method, we must face them fairly and squarely and direct our energies to helping people minimize those difficulties and deal with them when they are unavoidable.

Much of the practical challenge of the theology of the body and therefore of good NFP programmes must be to help people not just to know when it is best to abstain but also why, and then to have the love and strength to do so, and to have ways to abstain that build them and their relationship up. People need to be shown how the difficult integration of character and authenticity of action is ultimately liberating rather than enslaving. They need formation in chastity. They need to be shown how to be affectionate and joyful rather than cold and cranky when they are abstaining. They need to know how to ‘make love’ without genital sexual activity, how to be physical, intimate, warm in those times when they cannot go exactly where their bodies are drawing them, where the ‘lines’ are for them personally (as no one ‘size’ will fit all couples or individuals). They need after-care when they or their method has ‘worked’ and yet it has been at some psychological or emotional cost. And they need after-care when they or their method has ‘failed’ and they fear for a future with another child or without one.
The generation past has almost perfected the science of fertility and the art of NFP. The next generation faces the challenge of the theological, psychological and emotional sides of living NFP well, and the formation this requires. This challenge will be all the greater in a culture such as I described at the beginning of my paper which has in many ways lost its way with respect to sexuality and fertility, life and love, marriage and family. But we love a challenge!

1. Cf. BENEDICT ASHLEY OP, Theologies of the Body (Braintee MA: John XXIII Medical-Moral Research & Education Center, 1985); PETER BROWN, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, Columbia UP Press, 1988); RAMÓN GARCÍA DE HARO, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium: A Course in the Theology of Marriage (2nd ed, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993); JORGE MEDINA ESTÉVEZ, Male and Female He Created Them: On Marriage and the Family (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003).
2. JOHN PAUL II, Familiaris Consortio: Apostolic Exhortation on the Family (1981); and The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston, Books & Media, 1997). Cf. DONALD ASCI, The Conjugal Act as a Personal Act (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002); KIMBERLY HAHN, Life-Giving Love: Embracing God’s Beautiful Design for Marriage (Ann Arbor MI: Charis, 2001); JOHN KIPPLEY, Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Cincinnati: Couple to Couple League, 1991; RICHARD HOGAN & JOHN LEVOIR, Covenant of Love: Pope John Paul II on Sexuality, Marriage and Family in the Modern World (New York, Image Books, 1984); MARY SHIVANANDAN, Crossing the Threshold of Love: A New Vision of Marriage (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1999); VINCENT WALSH, Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: A Simplified Version (Merion: Key of David, 2002); CHRISTOPHER WEST, Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching (Ann Arbor MI: Servant Publications, 2000); CHRISTOPHER WEST, Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II's “Gospel of the Body” (Boston: Pauline Books, 2003); CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World (2004). Some useful websites include: http://www.catholicculture.com/ http://www.nfpoutreach.org/ http://www.purelove.net/ http://www. theologyofthebody.net/
3. Judge J. Thomas Merten in the US District Court in Kansas: see “Kansas judge blocks sex reporting law ,” Reuters July 26 2004.
4. PHILLIP HUDSON, “New push to give parents right to know,” The Age 4 April 2004; LOUISE YAXLEY, “Abbott backs down on proposed medical bill,” ABC Radio, PM programme, 15 June 2004.
5. PETER SINGER, “Heavy Petting,” nerve.com, reviewing MIDAS DEKKERS, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality (trans. Paul Vincent, London: Verso, 1994); cf. KATHRYN LOPEZ, “Peter Singer Strikes Again: This could be your kid’s teacher,” National Review 5 March 2001
6. BOB BIRRELL, VIRGINIA RAPSON & CLARE HOURIGAN, Men and Women Apart: The Decline of Partnering in Australia (Melbourne: Centre for Population and Urban Research, 2004); DAVID POPENOE & BARBARA DAFOE WHITEHEAD, The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America (Rutgers NJ: National Marriage Project, 2004).
7. Though this has recently been resisted by the Australian Federal Parliament and the California Supreme Court, it has at the time of writing this paper already been allowed by the governments or courts of Holland, Belgium, British Colombia, Manitoba, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Washington state and Yukon province; local officials have also conducted or permitted same-sex ‘marriages’ in California, Alaska and DC and by courts in and state. Civil unions have been recognized for same-sex couples in much of Scandinavia and in several states/provinces of North America. The Spanish Government plans to introduce same-sex ‘marriage’ later this year.
8. In Re Kevin (validity of marriage of transsexual) [2001] FamCA 1074 Chisholm J in the Family Court of Australia held that for the purposes of marriage law a transsexual man who is ‘socially’ a woman could be the wife in a marriage.
9. A few months ago a 35-year-old Frenchwoman, Christelle Demichel, married her dead boyfriend, becoming by fiat of the French President both married and widowed in the one act: Associated Press 11 February 2004.
10. It is hard to see on what basis polygamy can be resisted once de facto marriage, gay marriage, and easy divorce have been allowed. Two years ago the Law Commission of Canada produced a report on adult relationships which stated that the Commission could see no reason in principle to limit registration of relationships to two people.
11. PATRICK BUCHANAN, The Death of the West (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2002) and BRIGITTE BERGER & PETER BERGER, The War Over the Family (Garden City NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983). BILL MUEHLENBERG, Deconstructing the Family (Melbourne: Australian Family Association, 2004) helpfully lists the following titles addressing the modern campaign against the family: PHILIP ABBOTT, The Family on Trial (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1981); WILLIAM BENNETT, The Broken Hearth (New York: Doubleday, 2001); BRYCE CHRISTENSEN, Utopia Against the Family (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990); WILLIAM GAIRDNER, The War Against the Family (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992); GEORGE GRANT, The Family Under Siege (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1994); SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT & CORNELL WEST, The War Against Parents (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); RITA KRAMER, In Defense of the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1983); CHRISTOPHER LASCH, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: WW Norton, 1977); DANA MACK, The Assault on Parenthood (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1997); and JAMES Q. WILSON, The Marriage Problem: How our Culture has Weakened Families (New York: Harper Collins, 2002). See also MAGGIE GALLAGHER, The Abolition of Marriage: How we destroy lasting love (Washington DC: Regnery, 1996).
12. SARAH PRICE, “Morning-after pill sold by a beauty consultant,” Sun Herald 30 May 2004; “Morning after pill faces review,” The Age 12 June 2004; cf. “Doctors back morning-after pill plan,” AAP June 14 2004. Mr Abbott is not alone in his concerns: in the professional judgment of the Australian Medical Association, the US Federal Drugs Administration and some pharmacists, this drug is unsafe for over-the-counter distribution. Add to this its potential to cause early abortions and there is little wonder many in the community are worried.
13. cf. DONALD DE MARCO, Biotechnology and the Assault on Parenthood (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).
14. ANTHONY FISHER OP, “Love, Life, Sex – The Good News about Sexuality,” The Natural News: Newsletter of the Australian Council of Natural Family Planning, Winter 2004, 3-4 and Spring 2004.
15. WEST, Good News,112.
16. See JOHN MARSHALL, Love One Another: Psychological Aspects of Natural Family Planning (London: Sheed & Ward, 1995). Marshall, it should be noted, though active in NFP is a critic of Catholic teaching on contraception.