A HEART-TO-HEART Valentine talk on sex, love, and modern natural family planning (NFP) was held last month at the Continuing Medical Education Auditorium. Sponsored by Couples for Christ and the Department of Health, the event titled “A Valentine Date: Know True Lasting Love” featured international speaker Dr. Paddy Jim Baggot, who shared his personal experiences and lessons on sexuality.
Introducing the issue of “designer sex” practices, Dr. Oscar Tagulinao, the moderator, explained that sex has four interrelated values: pleasure, love, reproduction, and sacramental symbol.
“In modern culture, people think these values can be freely separated according to their preferences,” Tagulinao said. “There is the use of sex against its natural reproductive confines or without relation to love, there is lovemaking outside marriage, and reproduction without lovemaking like in test tube fertilization. Yet human sexual nature is an integrated design which we cannot disrupt without seriously harming the person’s total fulfillment and human dignity,”
In line with this, Baggot, an American geneticist, obstetrician and gynecologist, gave testimony on his former promiscuous lifestyle, and how he realized that relationships are more rewarding when partners cherish sex as something special to look forward to in marriage.
Following his medical training on NFP in the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Baggot stopped prescribing contraceptives after learning the value of periodic continence in NFP.
“Unrestricted approachability leads to overindulgence and boredom. Familiarity breeds contempt while abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. Often, a man who wants a divorce may change his mind after a period of separation. Periodic continence encourages married couples to revisit the joys of courtship, where love is expressed in ways without doing ‘it’” he said.
Baggot cited many studies on how NFP improves relationships, as couples felt accepted of their fertility, practices self-control, and equally shares family planning responsibility. NFP, through the modern Billings ovulation and sympto-thermal methods, works better than contraception, he said.
“NFP has no side-effects, can be used by those with irregular periods, and is very effective. A study on 19,843 poor women published in the British Medical Journal rated its effectiveness to 99.8 per cent. Charting cycles also leads to understanding women’s moods and bodies,” he said.
Baggot further held that NFP is biblical. According to him, periodic abstinence is being practiced since the Old Testament, though its Jewish observance (nidah) is not for avoiding pregnancy but for achieving it, by allowing sex during the fertile period.
“Genesis 38 condemns contraception (onanism), while the New Testament the pharmakeia which the ancients understood to be contraceptives. This is why in 1 Cor 7:5, St. Paul supported only periodic continence,” Baggot said.
