Last week our subject was the most welcome press release by Theresa Notare regarding breastfeeding. This week I will engage in the easy exercise of speculation about what might have been if that sort of promotion of breastfeeding had occurred 55 years ago. The fact that it didn’t happen is evidence of a serious lapse in putting into practice the traditional theological teaching that grace builds upon nature.
What if in the summer of 1952 the national family life agency of the American bishops had issued an urgent appeal to all bishops and priests to promote breastfeeding?
What if moral theologians of the day had researched the long and rich tradition of Catholic moral theology that stressed the obligation of mothers to breastfeed their own children? What if they had gone back only to October 1941 when Pope Pius XII took time out from his busy wartime activities to urge all mothers to breastfeed their babies if at all possible?
What if the Pre-Cana Movement that was growing by leaps and bounds at that time had promoted breastfeeding and especially the pattern of frequent nursing that we now call ecological breastfeeding?
What if the Church in America had enthusiastically welcomed the founding of La Leche League in 1956-1957? What if Msgr. George A. Kelly, truly a great and family-oriented priest, had promoted both ecological breastfeeding and the calendar-temperature rhythm method in his best selling 1958 book, The Catholic Marriage Manual?
If those things had happened and if the Catholic laity had internalized such teaching, I am confident that things would have been quite different in the turbulent Sixties. I was working as a lay evangelist in a parish in Santa Clara CA in the mid-Sixties, and I surely wish that the Catholic tradition of breastfeeding was alive and well in those days. I can still remember all too well the plight of a 30 year-old mother of seven children. This was probably 1965, and she had most likely married right out of college at age 22. In other words, she married in 1957. Her face was still very pretty, but her legs showed the effect of having so many children in such a short time, for varicose veins were obvious to most casual observer. She wasn’t complaining about the number of her children, but her question truly reached me. “I have another 15 years of fertility ahead of me. At this rate we will have 20 children. What are we supposed to do?” She asked me this because I was known to defend the Church’s teaching against unnatural forms of birth control. She knew I wasn’t going along with the new “scientific miracle” called the Pill, but she needed and wanted some help consistent with Catholic teaching. I tried to say something about calendar rhythm, but I was quite ignorant on that subject at the time. It had not been part of the theological program preparing me for parish evangelical work.
But what if she had been reached in a pre-marriage program that really advocated the Catholic and healthy tradition of exclusive and frequent breastfeeding for the first six to eight months and continued frequent nursing for at least two years. What if she had given birth at two-year intervals instead of annually? What if she and her husband had learned the rudiments of calendar-temperature rhythm, about the only thing that was somewhat well-known at the time? What if she knew from experience that Catholic teaching was eminently livable?
What if her practice of something approaching ecological breastfeeding and their knowledge of calendar-temperature rhythm was multiplied many thousands of times throughout the more than 10,000 parishes in the States at the time?
In my opinion, Father Charles Curran and his sympathizers would not have any sort of mass following just as they have no following among those practicing chaste NFP today. The difference would be that instead of about 3 percent of Catholic families currently practicing modern NFP, the numbers at that time would have been at least 65 percent. Yes, in 1962 or 1963, a survey indicated that some 62 or 63 percent of Catholic parents still accepted and followed Catholic teaching on birth control, and all they had was calendar rhythm or calendar-temperature rhythm, the latter of which could be highly effective if properly understood and practiced.
It had been a long theological teaching in the Catholic Church that grace builds upon nature. Somewhere along the line, our moral theologians accepted the growing practice of bottle-feeding. If asked, these moral theologians and pastors of yesteryear would have agreed that parents have a general obligation to do what is best for their children within their circumstances. But somewhere along the line Catholic doctors, theologians, and pastors forgot that breastfeeding really is best, that it is God’s plan for nutrition and nurturing and that it spaces babies.
The significance of Theresa Notare’s press release on breastfeeding is that it may sound a clarion call within the Catholic Church to restart the longstanding tradition in favor of breastfeeding as God’s own plan for baby care. We can hope also that a reawakened tradition will include the promotion and teaching of ecological breastfeeding as well, God’s own plan for spacing babies.
John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)
I just posted about this at my blog to get the word out. Excellent points, all of them.
I think you make some excellent points here. I do believe that women are not meant to have a baby every year, and that babies were meant to be breastfed.
I do have a question, though. Ecological breastfeeding does not result in extended fertility for all women (though it does for most). Additionally, some women have a serious reason to space pregnancy longer than the duration of breastfeeding infertility, say 3 or 4 years or more, or a serious reason to stop having children altogether. The rhythm method only works for women with very regular cycles. For me, for example, the rhythm method is utterly useless. When the rhythm method was the only known method of natural fertility regulation, what should a couple have done if they had a truly serious reason to avoid pregnancy for longer than breastfeeding makes the woman infertile, or indefinitely, and the rhythm method didn’t work for them?
I suppose they would just abstain altogether. But it seems to me that abstaining altogether would be far more harmful to a marriage than using contraception. (Yes, I know hormonal contraception is abortifacient and has serious side effects; I’m referring to barrier methods only.)
I am a Catholic NFP user but I admit that I struggle with what I would do in hard cases such as these. I thank God we know about modern NFP – I honestly don’t know what I would do if I lived in the 1950s and had a serious reason to avoid pregnancy for several years or to stop having children.
I agree that dissent from humane vitae would likely have been much less if ecological breastfeeding was widely promoted. But I still think Church teaching on contraception would have put an almost unbearable burden on some couples in these hard situations. Thoughts?
JOHN: Your question raises a question of fact and a question of morality. In point of fact, some couples with very irregular cycles probably did abstain for long times when all they had was calendar rhythm. Strict calendar rhythm was widely practiced by Christians and perhaps others during the 1930s, but it was superseded in the 1940s by the system known as calendar-temperature rhythm. Unfortunately, it was not as well known. Properly understood and practiced, calendar-temperature rhythm could be as effective as the more recent systems of systematic NFP. Some people developed their own systems. I taught one couple who had previously, and for some years, engaged in the marriage act only during menstruation.
From the perspective of morality, we can say with the assurance of Sacred Scripture that God never lays burdens upon us without giving us the graces to cope with the cross. Perhaps without realizing it, you seem to be adopting situation ethics. I find the following passage from Karl Rahner helpful for putting very difficult situations into the context of Christian discipleship.
“If we Christians, when faced with a moral decision, really realized that the world is under the Cross on which God himself hung nailed and pierced, that obedience to God’s law can also entail man’s death, that we may not do evil in order that good may come if it…; if we really realized that as Christians we must expect almost to take for granted that at some time in our life our Christianity will involve us in a situation in which we must either sacrifice everything or lose our soul, that we cannot expect always to avoid a ‘heroic’ situation, then there would indeed be fewer Christians who think that their situation requires a special ruling which is not so harsh as the laws proclaimed as God’s laws by the Church, then there would be fewer confessors and spiritual advisers who, for fear of telling their penitent how strict is God’s law, fail in their duty and tell him instead to follow his conscience, as if he had not asked, and done right to ask, which among all the many voices clamoring within him was the true voice of God, as if it were not for God’s Church to try and distinguish it in accordance with his law, as if the true conscience could speak even when it had not been informed by God and the faith which comes from hearing.” (Karl Rahner, Nature and Grace: Dilemmas in the Modern Church, Sheed and Ward, 1964, pp 55-56.)
Let us pray for one another and for those with special crosses.
John F. Kippley
I took offense at your comment about this mother you mention, “Her face was still very pretty, but her legs showed the effect of having so many children in such a short time, for varicose veins were obvious to most casual observer.” I started suffering from varicose veins at age 24, before I got pregnant for the first time. My varicose veins have worsened after two pregnancies, and I also have stretch marks, discolorations of the skin, not as tight a tummy, not as perky breasts, and more grey hair … someone once told me that these are my childrens’ artwork. I have sacrificed my body for them, I give my body to them, out of love for them, out of love for Him. Please be more sensitive in your comments and don’t add to a woman’s insecurities about not being visually appealing to her husband after rearing children.