Although often identified as the encyclical that continued the Church's ban on contraception, Humanae Vitae , more accurately, was a restatement of Catholic teaching on the splendor of the institution of Marriage. It shares the qualities of that love in that it is free, total, faithful and fruitful.
Conjugal love is free because it is a gift of one person to another.
This gift is total in that it requires the spouses to give and receive the entire gift of self which each offers. Finally, conjugal love is fruitful because marriage is by its very nature ordered to the procreation and education of children. Pope Paul VI repeated the Church's teaching that this dimension of married love is so essential that willfully to suppress this aspect of the conjugal act is to undermine marriage itself. As did the Second Vatican Council, Humanae Vitae also explained the Catholic doctrine of Responsible Parenthood noting that not all methods for regulating birth are morally upright. Natural Family Planning, when not used with a contraceptive intention, is morally licit.