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NFP: Good for the body, great for the soul
Monday, August 3, 2015
*Angelique Ruhi-Lopez
Prior to getting married in the Catholic Church in 2003, my fiancé and I took a Natural Family Planning class because we knew that’s what the Church encouraged as a method for both spacing and achieving pregnancies. Truth be told, I walked out of the classes confused and unsure whether this method was going to work. Fortunately, my husband-to-be understood the method perfectly and asked me to trust him.
We began charting before we were even married so that we could start to get the hang of the method. He would call me early in the morning to remind me to take my temperature and to check my mucus signs. It took some getting used to. NFP involves sacrifice and self-donation — as does all of family life.
But 12 years of marriage later, I’m glad I chose to trust — both in my husband and in God. My husband still keeps the charts and sometimes knows where I am in my cycle more than I do. It helps to know we’re in this together and it isn’t just one of us taking the responsibility for family planning, as happens with contraceptives.
Even the secular world is seeing the tide roll out on contraceptives. Many outside the faith are beginning to understand what the Catholic Church has always preached. In this day and age, when the push is for an all-natural lifestyle, with no hormones in our food, it seems counterintuitive to take unnecessary hormones to avoid having children.
Chemical contraceptives can also have many side effects, some of which can be fatal. As my husband likes to say, why would I want my wife to take something that could potentially be harmful to her health? NFP has no side effects, is free after taking the initial course, and couples can achieve an effectiveness rate of 97 to 99 percent when they follow all the guidelines of their NFP method for avoiding pregnancy.
There are different methods of Natural Family Planning, the most popular of which are the Sympto-Thermal Method, taught locally by the Couple to Couple League; the Creighton Model; the Marquette Method; the Billings Method; and the Family of the Americas.
If you are engaged to be married in the Church, I encourage you to take an NFP class and approach it with an open mind and heart. Even if you’ve been married for decades, it’s never too late to learn NFP.
If you’re anything like me, it may be confusing initially but soon it will become second nature and both you and your spouse will grow in appreciation of the amazing way in which God made our bodies.
This is not the old calendar or rhythm method. NFP methods espoused by the Church are scientifically based. They chart the woman’s basal temperature upon waking and/or mucus patterns throughout the month to help determine fertility. If a couple discerns just reasons for not seeking a pregnancy, they simply avoid relations during the fertile period of a woman’s cycle; if the couple seeks to achieve pregnancy, they have relations during the fertile period. It even works for women with irregular cycles and can help couples experiencing infertility, either to determine peak fertility or to detect any underlying causes of infertility that can be remedied.
At the conclusion of NFP Awareness Week, which was July 19-25, I look back on these 12 years of NFP use and am thankful for the fact that both my husband and I participate, together with God, in planning our family. It is a method that may not be as simple as popping a pill, but encourages us to communicate and be open to life, something our culture fears so much that it would rather just shut down a system that is designed and ordered toward creating new life. NFP helps us cooperate with our body’s natural systems instead of working against them.
Natural Family Planning has been a blessing and true gift in our marriage. And as this year’s NFP Awareness Week theme stated, it’s “Good for the body. Great for the soul!”
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