I’ve made the argument before that if you sincerely believe that “life” begins at conception and that if a fertilized egg doesn’t implant it’s a soul that’s perished then it’s actually a lot more moral of you to use the pill than not to because you won’t fertilize as many eggs that die off at a 50% or greater rate. Happily, Luc Bovens has argued just this in a philosophical paper. I’m wildly simplifying his argument but Lindsay explains it very well.
He makes a complex argument about fucking when the eggs are less likely to implant, etc. but to my mind the simple argument is this–half your fertilized eggs don’t implant. Statistically, that means that a woman that doesn’t “contracept” and has 7 children has killed 7 children. (Assuming you believe a fertilized egg is a child.) I “contracept” and have had no children and have likely killed no children. Therefore I’m not a child-killer but your average contraception-shunning woman is, by her very own standards.
Update: Shakes has more. She says that the rhythm method argument is unlikely to have sway with anti-contraception Protestants and in my experience, she’s right. They tend to argue that you should be “open” to as many children as possible. However, since they aren’t even trying to avoid conception, they are most likely fertilizing–and therefore killing–even more “babies” than people who use the rhythm method.
27 Responses to “NFP, the #1 killer of “children” in America”
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“But the difference is that nonimplanted eggs are part of God’s plan blah de blah de blah.”
/washes hands
Bravo, well put and all that… and I can’t resist a good Nelson Muntz “Hah-hah!”
Yes, but all the fussing and planning and abstaining and shit are way more “moral” than getting to screw whenever you want on Pills and IUDs, etc.
Anne,
Well said. Sex should be HARD WORK. Except when it comes to actively trying to please your female partner. Then, not so much.
Inadvertantly killing babies while following God’s will is OK not killing babies while defying God’s will is immoral.
This End (Times) User License is among the most confusing in the industry.
I think Bovens is playing a wry philosopher’s joke on the wingnut who attacked the pill for causing fetal death. His original paper is really good, and only two pages long. Check it out.
I have to admit, Bovens had me going there for a while. It’s a great paper because it’s brilliant social satire as well as good philosophy.
I bet he’s sitting back and waiting for anti-contraception nuts to take his argument seriously.
Frankly, I wonder if this kind of in joke isn’t dangerous. People will run with this thing.
Then there’s the issues of twins.
“Perhaps one in eight pregnancies start off as twins, but ah, we don’t have one in eight pregnancies ending as twins. In fact, the number is closer to one in 50. It was a seabird biologist, a man named David Anderson, who’s at Wake Forest University, who more than a decade ago, suggested the the reason that we produce twins so often is ecxactly the same reason that tropical boobies, black eagles and white pelicans produce two eggs; the second is insurance against the failure of the first. And nature is rife with principals like this that we can learn from to better understand ourselves.”
Dr. Scott Forbes - Prefessor of the University of Winnipeg, and the Author of “A Natural History of Families”
Quick transcript form the May 13, 2006 podcasted episode of CBC Radio Canada’s “Quirks and Quarks” show.
Oh yes, the old rhythm and blues. My mother was a devout Catholic and practiced the rhythm method. My father was a handsome and horny sailor boy. 8 years and 5 children later, she and my father hated each other. They couldn’t have any kind of a normal sex life, and it ended up destroying their marriage. It certainly wasn’t the only factor, (Pops being an enlisted man in the Navy with a big family and no money didn’t help) but it was a biggie. And, of course, they couldn’t get divorced because the Church said so. So we all grew up in the midst of screaming and fighting and alcoholism and infidelity (on my dad’s part) until each of us turned 18 and got the hell out of Dodge. They FINALLY divorced after something like 30 years of absolute hell.
They’re both dead now, and I hope they’ve found some peace. I wouldn’t wish that kind of life on my worst enemy. Unlike the sanctimonious pricks who are trying to force this “family value” on the rest of us.
Of course we all know that it is only natural to fuck with a calendar in one hand and a thermometer in the other.
That great and arbitrary abortionist in the sky…
Great stuff from Majikthise, Pandagon, and Shakespeare’s Sister on this fairly obvious paper (pdf) that argues that the rhythm method kills more embryos than contraceptives. It’s straightforward: by avoiding sex during the prime time for ovulation a…
I think I can honestly say that NFP would be the most foolproof method of birth control I could possibly choose, since ‘fuck[ing] with a calendar in one hand and a thermometer in the other’ would render me utterly unable to perform.
I feel no shame in admitting that, either.
CLUEless.
Absolutely clueless.
Alright, I’ll bite.
What’s so clueless?
I have the feeling compass is referring to the christowinger belief that “life begins exactly when we say it does, which is whenever fits our agenda best.”
Oh gods, plucky, please don’t get him started…
Ooh, look, Compass is back! Just when this evening was starting to look dull, too. So please Compass, feel free to explain how Saint Amanda of Fornicatus and her adherents are wrong, *wrong*, WRONG. Feel free to add a reminder that we’re all going to hell. I love the smell of brimstone on a rainy Thursday night.
I think I can honestly say that NFP would be the most foolproof method of birth control I could possibly choose, since ‘fuck[ing] with a calendar in one hand and a thermometer in the other’ would render me utterly unable to perform.
Auguste, I for one would love to see you try! However, having your hands full would get awkward, particularly if you and your partner in NFP gamete-slaughtering are being very good Christians and using the missionary position exclusively. In the marital bed. With the lights off. On the bright side, you don’t necessarily need your hands free to go down on your partner, but that’s non-procreative sex, and therefore sinful. Plus, no little non-latexed spermies getting anywhere near her lady bits, and so you wouldn’t need the calendar or the thermometer.
I think good people who are really concerned about the poor fertilized eggs should take likelong vows of chastity, since NFP is such a killer. Or they could just stick with lots of mutual oral sex, but oh yeah, that’s against the rules too. Chastity it is then. And for those people who worry about the human race dying out if everybody quits having sex, well, the Virgin Birth would suggest that wif God really wants babies to get born, He finds a way around the whole chastity thing.
Frankly, I wonder if this kind of in joke isn’t dangerous. People will run with this thing.
When the story about Delay’s people getting punked by Stephen Colbert broke, I wondered for a moment if Colbert ever has misgivings about staying in character like that and possibly occasionally being an effective wacky right-wing pundit. Kind of like what Vonnegut said in Mother Night–we are who we pretend to be.
Just wanted to clarify - NFP is NOT THE SAME THING AS THE RHYTHM METHOD.
NFP/FAM - you take your temperature first thing in the morning before you get out of bed (called the basal body temp, or BBT), and chart it to look for hormonal changes. You also pay attention to the consistency of your cervical fluid. The more like eggwhite it is, the closer you are to ovulation. You’re aware of your fertility status *for that cycle*. It is very very effective for both achieving and avoiding pregnancy if done correctly.
Rhythm method - no temperature taking, no paying attention to cervical fluid. Basically, you say, “I usually have a 28 day cycle, so that must mean I ovulate around day 14″ You’re guessing, without any measurable proof, and of course, eventually you’ll have a cycle that’s not “normal” and you’ll get pregnant.
Gyratory, we actually used NFP mixed with condoms for a couple of years. It was a trade off between condoms all the time and other forms of birth control which were not working.
Being that I create and play with data for a living, this worked very well for us and I found out some interesting things about my body and its patterns that I never noticed before. When it came time to actually make a baby, we did.
When I showed my charts to my midwife, she asked for the spreadsheet set up for her infertility patients to use, and I did a presentation on how I set them up.
I wouldn’t recomend NFP alone as family planning, however. When that temperature spikes, it isn’t time to not have sex it is time to chase him down, tie him up, and have your way. I can’t see how anyone can avoid that without going on a week long trip each month.
We did NFP when looking to conceive our kids, but more than that, I thought it was a great way to understand what was going on in my body. I’m one of those women who doesn’t do well on the pill — it made me moody, depressive, took away my sexual appetite almost completely (how’s that for contraception?!), and I gained 10 lbs/year while I was on it. So when I went off the pill, I bought a copy of “Taking Charge of Your Fertility”, and I’d really recommend it for all women from their first menstrual period on — I plan to give a copy to my daughter when she turns 10 or 11, so she’s aware of what’s going on in her body and can avoid the “Oh no, unexpected period!” business that most teenagers live with.
We still had sex when I was fertile, but used condoms during that time, and then we knew we were safe for not using condoms when I wasn’t fertile. Very freeing. It was also great for me because I had long, weird cycles — they’d be as short as 30 days or as long as 84 days (I kid you not — 84 days!). If I hadn’t been charting — which takes all of five minutes a day — I would have thought many times over that I was pregnant, and wasted all kinds of money on pregnancy tests. Turns out I was just not ovulating on day 14, but sometimes went as late as day 70 (for that long cycle). Also helped me find out that I had a short luteal phase, so that when we did TTC our second child, I was able to get a progesterone supplement that would help keep the zygote in place until it could implant and start pumping out its own stay-put hormones.
Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that NFP works for a lot of us, not just wingers, and even sex-loving atheists can get something out of it
I have always wondered just how in the hell wingnuts got around the “failure to implant naturally” business. I love to torture myself by constantly taking down “it’s a baby at conception so EC kills a BABY!!!” arguments by pointing out that not all conceptions will implant anyway. No one ever responds, or if they do it’s to say that if God wills it, it’s fine, but if a human (woman, remember) intervenes with HUMAN intentions, then it’s murder.
Which brings us right back around to: we must all consciously, constantly exhibit a deep yearning to be pregnant at all times. *sigh*
What really freaks me out is the notion of little winged fertilized egg-souls wending their way up to Heaven out of the uteri of countless pro-life, trying-to-conceive women every single month. Seems awfully, awfully wasteful to me.
Hey, I’ve been involved in two fetus-killings, but I blame God, far and away the world’s leading abortionist. My wife and I made three babies that we know of (the ones that implanted). The first became our daughter, but the second and third ended in miscarriages. Thanks a lot, Jesus!
I recommend the “lick a transparent triangle” method (there are many on the web.) It’s great to see the little fern shapes that say “You’re ovulating!” A wonderful teaching tool for teens as well.
http://www.craigmedical.com/ovulens.htm
What this highlights for me is, once again, the knee-knocking fear of taking responsibilities for anything they might do: thus, the over-riding compulsion to “leave it to the Lord.”
Actually, I think the 50% survival rate is a rather optimistic number. I looked this up once, and found some reproductive expert stating in an interview that under the best of conditions, only one-third of all conceived embryos ever make it to term.
And then there are also some (a distinct but rabid minority, admittedly), who claim that the way an IUD works is by preventing a fertilized embryo from adhering to the uterine wall. So depending on how you look at it, some forms of birth control are little more than mass murder to the winger set.
[…] A commenter at Pandagon (language warning) believes that such a reductio is the true aim of this paper, rather than serious discussion of the ethical issues involved. It is important to note that by the end of the article, Bovens has subtly changed his argument. Whether NFP causes additional spontaneous abortions due to its rules is no longer of paramount importance. He needs only to point out that in typical use, NFP fails far more often than the Pill does. He’s pointing out that if you believe embryos should be protected from dying unneccessarily, you should choose the method of birth control that results in the fewest embryo deaths. Based on failure rates, the Pill fits the bill and thus Bovens believes he has reduced pro-life arguments against abortifacient devices and medicines to absurdity. Biologist PZ Meyers, who blogs at Pharyngula, summarizes Bovens implied argument well. […]
[…] A commenter at Pandagon (language warning) believes that such a reductio is the true aim of this paper, rather than serious discussion of the ethical issues involved. It is important to note that by the end of the article, Bovens has subtly changed his argument. Whether NFP causes additional spontaneous abortions due to its rules is no longer of paramount importance. He needs only to point out that in typical use, NFP fails far more often than the Pill does. He’s pointing out that if you believe embryos should be protected from dying unneccessarily, you should choose the method of birth control that results in the fewest embryo deaths. Based on failure rates, the Pill fits the bill and thus Bovens believes he has reduced pro-life arguments against abortifacient devices and medicines to absurdity. Biologist PZ Meyers, who blogs at Pharyngula, summarizesBovens implied argumentwell. […]