I’m late to the party, but thought I should do my bit to promote NFP Awareness Week.
If you aren’t Catholic (and in a sad commentary on . . . lots of things, maybe even if you are) you may have no idea what NFP even is. The doctor I went to see right after I was married didn’t. Of course, that’s been a while back, so maybe the situation has improved.
NFP stands for Natural Family Planning, and it’s not your parents’ Rhythm Method, which didn’t work. Learned properly and followed exactly, it’s just about as effective as the Pill. Only it’s permitted by the Church and non-abortifacient, and if you don’t care about that stuff, maybe being able to avoid pregnancy AND possible blood clots and other unsavory consequences of bombarding your body with unnatural hormones for extended periods of time might pique your interest.
I remember my first exposure to NFP. I was a Senior at Knoxville Catholic High School, in a co-ed class taught by a priest, and he showed us some goofy movie. We heard the words “cervical mucus,” became disgusted and/or embarrassed, and quickly tuned out. Now, I give him props for at least trying, but I can think of better ways to introduce the topic. And because no groundwork had been laid beforehand (at least, not that I remember) to explain exactly WHY artificial contraceptives were wrong, other than “because the Church said so,” none of us understood the importance of what he was trying to teach us.
I was engaged to be married before I heard about NFP again, not in a marriage preparation class, but rather in a Christian Marriage class at Georgetown, which I took voluntarily as one of the classes I needed to get a minor in Theology. This priest had us read Certain Declarations Concerning Sexual Ethics, Familiaris Consortio, and Humanae Vitae before we read The Art of Natural Family Planning. These books changed my attitude and shaped my future life (and John’s, which he didn’t much appreciate since he was not a Catholic at the time!).
I’m not going to go into the details and the science because if you are truly interested and want to know you can Google the links as well as I can. I can only share with you the freedom of knowing that you are 1) following the law of the Church; 2) not polluting your body with chemicals; 3) not interfering with intimacy by the use of unpleasant and inconvenient devices. Given today’s value for doing things naturally, I’m surprised that more people don’t embrace NFP for purely ecological reasons.
Well, you say, but it doesn’t work. You have five children and everyone I know who writes about NFP has at least that many if not more. I don’t want five children.
I didn’t want five children either. I wanted ten. See how I don’t have ten? John didn’t want ten. That’s called compromise. I’ve been married for not quite 25 years. If NFP doesn’t work, why do I only have five children? Do you think that six-year space between Teddy and William was just luck?
Not Your Parents' Rhythm Method
