The following comes from a March 24 Conjugality blog post:
Having produced several videos about natural family planning (NFP) and fertility awareness methods (FAM), I know how challenging it can be to come up with original angles, fresh dialogues, authentic couple conversations and disagreements, and narratives that can captivate the target audience. That’s exactly what Miscontraceptions, Cassie Moriarty’s first documentary, accomplishes.
Miscontraceptions (here on Youtube) is bringing fertility awareness education to the millennial generation (which is who needs it right?).
Here are four of the things we especially liked about it:
It starts with the depiction of a real and likely situation: Cassie is complaining about the Pill’s side effects. Her boyfriend, Kyle, is trying to help and starts telling her about Natural Family Planning. She thinks that it’s the ineffective and passé rhythm method and they argue, in a hilarious sequence.
It also shows the two being vulnerable, tackling a difficult conversation, living through a conflict and resolving it. They’re adorable as a couple, especially because they show something profound happening to them: the courage of a conflictual discussion about birth control and the humility to resolve it.
It is very funny: kudos for demonstrating dialogue about a common sexual challenge honestly, in a humorous way and without vulgarity. The dialogues are authentic and fun, and the use of special effects and graphics is highly creative and eye-grabbing.
It brings in different perspectives: Kyle tells the guy’s side of the story. Interestingly he is the one pushing charting on his girlfriend. We also hear the perspective of a seasoned sex educator and that of a FAM teacher. Cassie takes risks and give a voice to people who are not the traditional promoters of FAM or NFP, a successful attempt to bring everybody together on something as fundamental yet controversial as FAM and NFP.
This brilliant short film stirs us up and gets us wanting to jump in on the dialogue on this topic. One argument we’d like to throw in the ring is that instead of advocating the use of a condom at the time of fertility, we’d encourage abstinence during the fertile times. The effectiveness rate of birth control methods is only as good as the worst method you use. Taking a chance on a notoriously faulty (not to mention pleasure-killing) option such as the condom right when you’re fertile is taking a pretty big chance. Fertility awareness methods used correctly, with abstinence during fertile times, are your best option to avoid pregnancy. However, we can admit that the graphic in the movie is visually effective, and that it may help open the discussion to a larger audience.
Another point we want to throw our two cents in on is when Cassie says at the end that “it’s not for everybody.” We agree that many women will think that it’s not for them, for various reasons, but we think it is for everybody. Let me say that differently: we believe that every woman should learn to chart. Period. After that, whether they take it into their relationship is another question, because there is a highly personal discussion that needs to happen with her partner/spouse, just as Kyle and Cassie did. Yet, in general, we believe that all couples could benefit from using it.
I do not like post-1960’s books, films, and other materials, on these kinds of topics. When I was young, all people believed sex outside marriage, to be a very serious sin! Those “getting in trouble,” in this way, were viewed as extremely low-class, and morally weak— in the same category, as juvenile delinquents! You don’t want your kids associating with these types of “low class” juvenile delinquents! I cannot imagine, why this couple has no MORAL CONSCIENCE, to begin with! Sex outside Marriage is a MORTAL SIN!! PERIOD!! Where is the correct teaching, of SELF-CONTROL? Where is the basic MORAL LIFE, of such people? Where is the proper RESPECT, when dating? And setting correct limits? Don’t they understand, that sex is sacred– AND BELONGS ONLY IN MARRIAGE, FOR MATURE ADULTS?? The basic purpose of sex– is to CONCEIVE A CHILD! NOT TEEN “PARTYING!!” A mature adult husband and wife, must be prepared for a child to arrive— bottles, binkies, blankies, diapers, crib, and all!!
The Couple to Couple League works with engaged or married persons, usually teaching at Catholic Churches. They only advocate having marital relations within marriage. The method can also be used for fertility, getting pregnant. The program in the video is a different program, not the Couple to Couple League or the Catholic Church related Billings Method program.
Regarding the Mortal Sin of Contraception:
Doctrine of the Faith – CCC: ” 2399 The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).”
&
CCC: ” 2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.
These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom.
In contrast, “every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” is intrinsically evil:
Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality. . . .
The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . . . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality. “