Natural Family Planning: Foundation for Building a Culture of Life—Quotable Insights

“CANFP rejoices in the U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs decision which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade law legalizing abortion nation-wide. While the issue of the legalizing or the illegalizing of abortion is now the matter of state governments, CANFP realizes that there will continue to be much work to do in California. CANFP remains committed to promoting natural means of postponing and achieving pregnancy and will continue to make efforts to make all forms of contraception not an option, but especially those forms that are abortifacients.” Fr. Blaise Berg, STD“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” Dobbs

“The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception…In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage.” Justice Clarence Thomas

St. Pope John Paul II, 1985, Evangelium Vitae

“The trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life.” #97

“In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a “new feminism” which rejects the temptation of imitating models of “male domination”, in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.” #99

“I address to women this urgent appeal: “Reconcile people with life” You are called to bear witness to the meaning of genuine love, of that gift of self and of that acceptance of others which are present in a special way in the relationship of husband and wife, but which ought also to be at the heart of every other interpersonal relationship.” “I address to women this urgent appeal: “Reconcile people with life” You are called to bear witness to the meaning of genuine love, of that gift of self and of that acceptance of others which are present in a special way in the relationship of husband and wife, but which ought also to be at the heart of every other interpersonal relationship.” #99

“Despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree.” #13

“It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not help the young to accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.” #97

“The life which could result from a sexual encounter becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception” #1

Contraception and Abortion: Fruits of the Same Tree? William Newton, Linacre Quarterly, May 2015, 82(2): 135–148

“There was just eight years separating the legalization of contraception and abortion in the USA (1965 and 1973); seven years in Britain (1961 and 1968); eight in France (1967 and 1975).”

“Contraception uncouples (in the mind of the individual who accepts it as normal behavior) the relationship of sexual intercourse to babies and to life-long commitment: in a word, it trivializes sex. Trivial sex, in turn, leads inevitably to unwanted pregnancies, which inexorably leads to abortion.”

“The most fundamental reason why contraception fosters abortion is that contraception changes the meaning of sex, and not just in this or that act of sexual intercourse, but in the consciousness of whole cultures.”

“Contraception is the linchpin in a cultural revolution that has abortion as one of its principal effects. The overall result of this is that, far from liberating a culture from the scourge of abortion, contraception engrains, and entrenches this practice into a culture that accepts it.”

“When sex becomes recreational, individuals engage in sexual intercourse with persons whom they certainly would not want to collaborate with in the long term and demanding task of child-rearing”

“Contraception embraces a notion of science and progress as the search for power unconstrained by the question of the good. This philosophy of science has obvious and disastrous effects when it is applied to other life issues. It inevitably leads to a totalitarian claim over the origins of life itself, which manifests itself not just in abortion but in illicit forms of artificial procreation, cloning and embryo experimentation: according to the logic of technocracy, as these technologies become possible, they become good.”