Natural Family Planning Can Restore Much That’s Lost

Last November, many Spokane churches adopted a Community Marriage Covenant Agreement to help reduce the rate of divorce and to restore a culture which has seen permanent marriage and respect for human life deteriorate.

A program at Sacred Heart Medical Center also has a plan for addressing these concerns - natural family planning or NFP. NFP supporters are convinced that if you search history, a compelling case can be made that widespread approval of artificial contraception began our current cultural tailspin.

Statistics prove that NFP can, in fact, reverse the collapse of committed marriage: the divorce rate among couples who use natural family planning is less than 3 percent. Natural family planning is not the rhythm method. It is a scientifically validated family planning method which is 99 percent effective and which uses no artificial means, such as chemicals, barriers or surgery to control fertility.

Spouses decide together whether they should avoid or space pregnancy by using restraint during their fertile period.

Joy DeFelice, a registered nurse and the director of the NFP Program at Sacred Heart, explains that rhythm relied on forecasting a woman’s ovulation based on her past menstrual cycles. Because many women have irregular cycles or their cycles are affected by stress, the calculations for predicting when ovulation would occur were often wrong, resulting in unexpected pregnancy.

DeFelice notes that a man is potentially always fertile (unless he has a physical problem), but a woman is not. Women have both infertile and fertile periods in their cycles.

Additional scientific research now allows couples using NFP to accurately identify their fertile and infertile period by means of three physiological signs: changes in cervical mucus, the primary sign; and if needed, additional signs of waking temperature and/or changes in the cervix.

NFP allows a couple to know their fertility status on a daily basis. No other family planning method can tell a couple when the woman is fertile - not the condom, not the pill, nothing.

With NFP, all normal body processes remain undisturbed. In addition, NFP can be used in all types of cycles and reproductive circumstances, including throughout breastfeeding and premenopause. Natural family planning costs nothing to use and repeated studies show 99 percent effectiveness when accurately taught and applied.

For couples who learned NFP at Sacred Heart, DeFelice reports an effectiveness rate of 99.4 percent.

Natural family planning cooperates with the natural law. It teaches that fertility is to be treasured, not feared. It fosters a closeness between the couple that results from increased communication, mutual responsibility and mutual decision making for their combined fertility.

Exercising restraint during a couple’s fertile days helps spouses preserve the specialness of their sexual relationship and assists them in developing other aspects of their relationship - emotional, spiritual and psychological.

Natural family planning is also ending the heartache of infertility for many couples. NFP not only identifies the fertile time of a woman’s cycle,it also identifies her most fertile days. Eighty-four percent of couples who received instruction at Sacred Heart Medical Center who were previously unable to conceive became pregnant using natural family planning.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI warned that separating the sexual aspects of love and life from each other had dangerous social ramifications beyond just the private act between a man and woman. He warned that contraception would lead to increased promiscuity, abortion, adultery, domestic violence, pornography and divorce.

Thirty years later, his warnings have come true. In addition to the 35 million American babies who have died from legal abortion, the divorce rate among couples who use contraceptives is well over 50 percent.

For the past 70 years, the Roman Catholic Church has been the sole advocate for an integrated view of human worth, sexuality and reproduction.

Before 1930, all Christian denominations taught that contraception was evil. In 1930, the Anglican Church became the first of many Christian churches to abandon the historic Christian teaching against contraception. Protestant writer Charles Provan’s 1989 book, “The Bible and Birth Control,” is raising new awareness, however, that the Pope was right. Consequently, growing numbers of couples, Catholic and Protestant, are embracing natural family planning as the way to naturally and faithfully experience married love.

Excluding natural fertility from marital love can change sex from the sacred communication which binds two into one into mere physical activity. If we view our bodies as mere biological material, I fear we will continue to degenerate into simply a product of the evolutionary chain - just another animal to be bred, aborted, neutered or “put to sleep” for the general good of society.

We can reverse that trend if we restore physical, spiritual and moral integrity to marriage. When husbands and wives cooperate with their bodies’ natural physiology to reunite love and life through natural family planning, their marriage embraces human sanctity in one of the most profound acts of love God created. Doing so can transform our marriages, our families and our culture into communities of life and love suitable to persons who are created in the image and likeness of God.

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