Can You Use Protection When You Are Married?

Question: Can you use protection when you are married?

Isn’t it crazy to think about how a new human life could have been brought about asexually like a strawberry or yeast. It could have been designed sexually, but not unitively like guppies or even brought about by some sort of lifelong partner without the total gift of self like swans and puffins. But it wasn’t. For us, sex is something so different. It touches the totality of our humanity – our bodies and souls.  

Because of its potentiality for a new human life to exist it also carries within itself a powerful and distinct form of human love. This may be why sex moves people to the core and why it say, “now you will never be the same.” 

Whenever we give ourselves sexually, we do something that cannot help but also mean that there is a chance for a new life to be created. Now for two people to give themselves totally to another, what they are fully giving includes their bodies, and these bodies have written the potential to bring a third person into existence. Crazy stuff right? 

So if a married couple has vowed to give themselves completely to one another, the act of contracepting the potential for new life to exist would not only be a violation to their promises to one another, but also to the nature of sex itself. 

Though some may desire for sex not to mean a child may result from this action for whatever reason, the reality is that what we may intend or desire subjectively can’t change the objectivity of the meaning of sex. To join two bodies together is to say. “I give myself to you in all that this act means,” even if you want to pick and choose the unitive intimacy part only and leave the baby making part out of it. 

The unitive intimacy that is a part of the purpose of sex is so much more than an intense sexual desire released or a pleasurable experience for a couple. What makes sex a mutual gift of selves is that there is something to be given away, that there is something missing in the man that is found in the woman and there is something missing in the woman that is found in the man. It is in their incompleteness that makes it possible to give themselves to each other sexually. The incompleteness that gives them the nature to give and receive fully. But their incompleteness isn’t two halves coming together to make a whole, but rather two whole persons who can create a third. It is not like the woman is the lung coming to meet the man who is the diaphragm and together they come to take a breath, but it is like this in the procreative function of human nature. Unless two become “one flesh” procreation doesn’t occur. 

You can not partly give yourself because the self is indivisible and the only way to give of yourself is completely. 

So to strip away the procreative possibilty from the unitive purpose of sex is to distort the nature of sex and thus so naturally a marriage as well. If we split the meaning of sex (procreation and unitive intimacy) we split ourselves. These things are truly joined even when we don’t want the package deal that they hold. Married couples don’t have the ability to pick and choose which part of sex they want to express in that moment. Some people may pick and choose one element and other choose the other, but they share the common faset that we as human people can’t change the nature of sex, but we can work with it’s nature. 

It is natural for a married couple to want to be wise about bringing a third person into existence if there are reasons for why that would actually not be a prudent choice. Instead of contraceptives couples can use methods of natural family planning to either achieve or avoid a pregnancy. Planning or avoiding days of which the couple would or wouldn’t have sex does not alter the nature of sex for the couple would remain open to life if one is created. Being Catholic and having sex doesn’t mean that there must be a change of pregnacy with every encounter of sex, intead it does mean that the couple’s marital sexual activity must be ordered towards and open to the potential of new life.

When couples separate sexual pleasure from the one-flesh union, then sex becomes selfish whether it feels that way or not. It becomes about what he gets or what she gets instead of the two of you coming together. This attitude can undermine the sexual relationship and the marriage. This is what the Church is trying to protect you from when it tells us to not use any forms of contraception in our relationships.

When a mother says to her child, “Don’t play in the street” she says this not because she hates playing or because she wants her child to be miserable and not enjoy the beautiful day, but because she wants what is best for her child and her community. This is the same for the Catholic Church when it comes to contraception. It tells couples they need to avoid contraception in their marriages not because the Church hates sex or because they need couples to make more future Catholics, but because she wants the absolute best for us and marriages!