Head's up: the clip begins with an ad. Sorry about that. I think it's worth it anyway.

• "A woman's health decision is between her priest and her husband."
• "If you want to control your fertility, do it the way God intended – with a cold, loveless marriage."

Love it.

(Via Chloe at Feministing.)

In a poignant, heartwrenching essay on Natural Family Planning method birth control use in the alt-conservative Protestant counterculture Sarah Morice-Brubaker of Religion Dispatches reflects on her own experience and that of a couple, Sam and Bethany Torode, who's book Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception is a best-seller in it's small but ideologically passionate niche.

Morice-Brubaker makes the awesome case that "an ideal method for the couples who can make it work" isn't the same thing, at all, as ideal period.

I know couples who say that they’ve had a very positive experience with NFP. I don’t second-guess their reasons for saying so. There’s no reason not to take them at their word, as far as I’m concerned. But would their testimonies have made for a telling rejoinder to Oppenheimer’s column? I don’t think so.

Remember, Open Embrace does not advance the view that natural family planning might be a fun thing for married couples to try just for kicks—like a book club or dance lessons—on the off chance that you might be one of the married couples that turns out to bond over it. Open Embrace presents natural family planning as a really good thing for married couples, as such, to do. It is predicted to bring them closer. Married couples. In general. As a group.

In their early 20s, the Torodes believed they could predict this—about themselves, and about all the potential married couples who might read their book; including, presumably, couples facing mental or physical health problems, lack of support, or simple inability to reliably take body temperature at the same time every day.

So, really, the question is not: “Are there NO couples out there who ever have a positive experience avoiding artificial contraception?” Surely there are. Rather, the question is this: “Can every married couple everywhere really benefit from avoiding artificial contraception—and more to the point, who in the heck could possibly be in the position to know this?”

Source: Religion Dispatches

In other words? No.

In fact, so "no" that just a few years after writing their "classic" pean to NFP as the ultimate bonding experience the Torodes were divorced! Sam Torodes now says "I am out of the business of trying to tell people what they should do. I am out of that business for good."

Good rule for authors of parenting books to live by? Don't write a book about the success of... well, pretty much anything related to parenting or domesticity when you've only been doing it two years. And definitely don't wait only two years to start bragging about how radical, bonding, nurturing, and foolproof your controversial method of birth control method is until, you know, you've successfully managed to, say, space two pregnancies.

Say what you will about the (smug? extremist?) Duggar parents with their 20-odd children but at least they had the sense to wait till their first four children were out of high-school before starting to issue propaganda tracts about white Christian men's duty to keep their wives continuously pregnant and white Christian wive's duty to let them.

As Morice-Brubaker puts it

[A]s I read them, the authors of Open Embrace have thus presented their own “balance.” In 2002, they proffered the view that natural family planning is an inherent benefit to marriage as such, with the implication that it’s possible to honestly make such pronouncements about people’s lives whom one does not know. Now, in 2011, they’re saying that it’s more complicated than that

Yeah, that.

The need to adjust our pre-feminist notions of paternal responsibility notwithstanding, this unpublished draft from last December is a reminder that we need to adjust pre-HIV notions of "sexual freedom" in relationship to condom use.  (The context was the Julian Assange incident.)

Anthony McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes, who remembers the impact HIV had on his community of gay men, brings his bitter understanding of condom-avoiding "knowing transmission" to heterosexuality.

...as you know, women are infected with HIV through vaginal sex as well as through anal sex by men who are infected. Straight men are often infected through anonymous sex with women or men just as gay men are. I suspect that for many women, who have grown up with the idea that AIDS is primary a problem for gay men are at the stage gay men were in the early days before the syndrome even had a name.

Of course this is all by way of explanation for my comments on the accusations made about Julian Assange. Being a witness to the deaths of dozens of gay men I knew, knowing that just about all of them with a few exceptions, likely were infected through casual sex with someone they didn't know, knowing that women can be infected by men, all of that informs my thinking on whether or not people should be having casual sex with people they don't know in 2011. And the fact is they shouldn't. Women deserve better than they're going to get from men under those circumstances, men who have sex with men deserve better than they get from it. There is nothing liberated about being infected with HIV or hepatitis or chlamydia or any number of other infections that can injure and kill you. Having sex with someone who can persuade you to engage in sex you don't want or who can trick or force you into it is the opposite of free choice. No more than getting robbed by a conman. And there is no law you can make that will protect you from any of that which is stronger than protecting yourself. And there is nothing that is more likely to protect you than knowing who it is you're agreeing to have sex with.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

At the time I drafted this I was on a real tear about "knowing transmission" not only of sexually transmitted diseases but pregnancy.  The more diligently men pursue reproductive responsibility the easier, both socially and biologically, it'll be to advocate for revision of paternity statutes as well.

(Good news on the paternal contraception front, incidentally.  Via Beth Saunders, it sounds like in addition to condoms, withdrawal, and/or surgical sterilization men will soon have not one but three reversible hormonal contraceptives to pick from, which means that men will finally be able to use double contraception without help from a partner.)

Will we ever be able to ditch condoms? Not as long as there continue to be multiple partners and sexually-transmittable illnesses. But with the possibility of new male contraceptives we can dramatically reduce the possibility of knowingly or even just carelessly transmitting paternity.

Speaking of emergency contraception, and the tendency to blame women for using it, and the tendency to blame women, for that matter, for just about any choice they make regarding their reproductive choices and/or opportunities, and especially for anti-choicers to blame them for all of the above because they're convinced that hormonal contraception is really a closet abortion conspiracy, Jenna of My Sex Professor brings a little potentially welcome news

Many men are disappointed with their lack of contraception options: between the barrier method and vasectomy lie few other choices. A new method (RISUG) is being tested, which entail a one-time reversible injection that prevents sperm from penetrating the egg. The procedure would take five minutes and be effective for at least ten years

Source: My Sex Professor

While for years we've heard stories about how male contraceptives are just around the corner, and are thus justified in feeling a little wary, it's worth pointing out that at least the stories are coming closer and closer together.  And this one actually sounds fairly promising!

It's great news, obviously, for at least the following reasons

1) There really aren't a lot of contraception options available for men.  Worse, of the three available -- condoms, vasectomy, and withdrawal, the most recently developed, vasectomies, were introduced nearly 200 years ago! Since then?  Nothing.  And say what you will about condoms (I say they're pretty good at preventing disease and pregnancy if they don't break and if you use them correctly) they're kind of hard to use correctly until you've really gotten the hand of it, by which point... but I digress.  What I was going to say is this sounds promising because it would be really, really nice to have something intermediate to the permanence of vasectomies and the uncertainties of condoms

2) The introduction of reliable, realistic, reversible and hard to screw up contraception for men will change the blame-women-first-and-always dynamic.  Because once solutions become available for men there won't be that sort of shoulder-shrugging "what can ya do, man" resignation men who fuck up are able to rely on from their peers.  Because, in part, the obvious answer to "what can ya do, man" would then be "what you can do, asshole, is get a shot once every ten years.  You're not getting any sympathy from us."  So that's a big deal.

3) When it comes to the situations where emergency contraception is most likely used (condom breaking, or not using a condom for first-time sex after a long drought, or when functionally incapacitated by drugs or alcohol) the odds of neither party being on some form of contraception can be way lower.

4) Taking items 1-3, above, into account, the focus of responsibility for contraception can shift away from 100% women to more like 50/50 men and women.  (If the product Jenna mentions is as effective and non-intrusive as promised responsibility could shift further onto men.  Although, obviously, an easily used saliva- or semen-based test to quickly confirm effectiveness would be welcome as well.)

But then there's

5) The beauty of the proposed method is that by robbing sperm of the ability to merge with eggs it'll make "conception" impossible! Which ought to shut the ugly pie holes of the "contraception is really abortion" covens.

And, if I can put on my speculative psychopathology-of-the-anti-choice crowd had for a moment, it could even be that...

6) If contraception happens inside men's bodies the anti-choice crowd won't actually care.  Or at least if they do they'll have to start basically from scratch.  And while yes, as a matter of fact it would be better if the anti-choicers were really anti-choice and not just anti-women-as-autonomous-agents, as most evidence suggests. But even then...

7) If the anti-choicers did turn on men and start running the same ill-willed intrusions at least it would put men squarely on the front lines  with women, as opposed to the status quo where most men have basically been confined at best to the sidelines.