I was over a friend’s house picking up a buddy of mine this past weekend. He wasn’t ready so I ended up hanging out for a few minutes with his wife and her friend. I’d met the other woman before but don’t know her all that well. She was talking a mile a minute about how “natural” she lives and how great she feels. Of course, she was telling us that we should be living the same way. She lectured me about different herbs and how she’s detoxing her body.

She’s been “living naturally” since New Year’s Day. (Her words)

She said she feels so much better (“fantabulous!!!” was her word) and she’s been doing a lot of reading about all the “unnatural” chemicals people put in their bodies and how harmful it all is.

My buddy came into the room and rolled his eyes but I didn’t know her well enough to joke about it since she seemed to take it all very seriously so I listened to her. Actually, I kind of pretended to listen by just nodding my head and occasionally grunting.

In the conversation my buddy joked about me “detoxing” my five children.

“What?!” gasped the woman. “Really? You really have five kids?”

One of the funny things about writing a Catholic blog is you sometimes forget that having five kids is a lot. But around the Catholic blogosphere I read about so many people who have that many children and many more that I forget how countercultural it is to have more than two children.

Then she asked me if I was crazy?

I responded I was. (I mean, how else do you respond to that?)

“My gosh,” she said, slowing herself down for a moment. “I couldn’t even imagine. One’s enough for me. I’m not having anymore. My husband wants more but thank God for the Pill.”

Ms. Natural Living is on the Pill?

I couldn’t hold me tongue so I just threw it out there. “How does all this natural living coincide with all the chemicals you’re putting in your body from the Pill?”

And then she said that she needs to be on the Pill because it allows her to live naturally. If she had more children then she wouldn’t have the time to live the way she wanted to live, she said.

I held my tongue after that. Remember, I was the crazy one.

Erin Manning wrote:

What a horrific lie it is, to convince millions upon millions of healthy woman that their bodies’ natural fertility is a terrible disease for which a decades-long prescription to a drug engineered to fight against it is not only necessary, but imperative!

It is rather an oddity that with all this focus on natural foods that many women still don’t consider birth control in the same manner.