Natural Family Planning
Safe, Healthy, Effective, Environmentally Sound, Marriage Building, Easy, and Inexpensive

Natural Family Planning (NFP) is virtually unknown to many people, but its advantages are many. Although the fertility awareness of NFP is most often used to effectively achieve, postpone, or avoid pregnancy (hence the name "Natural Family Planning"), it can also be very beneficial to health conscious single women. NFP is safe, healthy, effective, environmentally sound, marriage building, easy, and inexpensive.

NFP is safe because it is 100% natural. It requires no unnecessary drugs, chemicals, hormones, contraceptive devices, or surgery. None of the risks associated with most contraceptive methods and devices need to be taken with NFP. NFP is immediately reversible and has no adverse side effects.

NFP is healthy because it encourages awareness of and responibility for your body. Women using NFP will know when their cycles are abnormal or irregular, and notice any changes immediately. NFP can even help detect the symptoms of serious disorders. NFP also encourages better nutrition, which is intimately connected with fertility.

NFP is an effective way to achieve, postpone, or avoid pregnancy. A woman doesn't have to have regular cycles to use NFP to detect fertility. NFP cannot cure physical conditions causing permanent infertility, but many couples suffering from low fertility use NFP with great results. Couples looking to postpone or avoid pregnancy can use NFP with a 98-100% level of effectiveness, comparable to or even better than contraceptives.

Because NFP is 100% natural, it is also environmentally sound. Researchers have recently found that many commonly used pharmaceuticals, like contraceptive pills made with synthetic hormones, have become a source of hazardous wastewater pollution. The effects of long term exposure on humans are not yet known. NFP uses no unnecessary drugs, chemicals, hormones, or contraceptive devices, so it produces no environmentally dangerous waste. Environmentlists can appreciate the tremendous and far-reaching value of a little responsible self-control!

NFP is marriage building. Many husbands and wives who use NFP together testify that NFP actually contributes to communication, openness, honesty, harmony, responsibility, and mutual awareness, understanding, appreciation, and respect. Putting aside all the risks, adverse side effects, and cumbersome interference associated with contraceptives, they also report that they enjoy natural and more spontaneous lovemaking. Unreserved self-giving is a hallmark of NFP.

NFP is easy, both to learn and to practice. Many organizations, couples, and books are devoted to teaching the various methods of NFP. The Couple to Couple League primarily promotes the Sympto-Thermal Method through classes, and most couples can use it "without further counseling after two or three cycles of experience." With their CCL Home Study Course you can learn all the basic rules of the S-T method in a month. NFP is scientifically based, but you don't have to be a scientist to learn or use it.

NFP is inexpensive. You don't have to keep paying for condoms, sponges, spermicidal jellies and foams, pills, etc., to postpone or avoid pregnancy. Tubal ligations and vasectomies can cost a lot, and even more if you decide to try to "reverse" them. Once you learn NFP, you can use it or stop using it whenever you like at no extra cost.

Brief moral considerations: Is NFP morally acceptable? Most non-Catholics know that Catholics oppose contraception on moral grounds. But isn't NFP the same thing as contraception, they wonder, when it is used to postpone or avoid pregnancy? No. Postponing or avoiding pregnancy for just and unselfish reasons is not morally wrong in itself, according to the Catholic Church's teaching: "Spouses have the inalienable right to found a family and to decide on the spacing of births and the number of children to be born... in accordance with the objective moral order which excludes recourse to contraception, sterilization, and abortion," (Charter of the Rights of the Family article 3). Contraception is the deliberate frustration of the life-giving potential of the marital act - an immoral means of birth regulation. NFP, on the other hand, does not deliberately frustrate the life-giving potential of the marital act. Instead, it accepts and respects natural periods of human fertility and infertility. Abstaining from the marital act during fertile periods does not deliberately frustrate the life-giving potential of any marital act because there is no marital act (during the fertile periods) to frustrate. As Pope Paul VI wrote, "these two situations are essentially different... in [NFP], the spouses legitimately use a faculty that is given by nature; in [contraception] the spouses impede the order of generation from completing its own natural processes" (Humane Vitae 16).

So why do Catholics believe contraception is intrinsically disordered? Many books have been written on the topic, and not all the reasons can be covered here. (Janet Smith's Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later, for example, has some good natural law arguments against contraception in chapter 4.) One crucial reason, however, is that contraceptive intercourse is a lie. In the words of Pope John Paul II: "The innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of the husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality," (Familiaris Consortio 32, emphasis added). In other words, contraceptive intercourse is like betrayal with a kiss: it has the appearance of total and unreserved self-giving, but in reality there are reservations. (For a more developed understanding of this particular case against contraception, c.f. Karol Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility.)

Natural Family Planning is safe, healthy, effective, environmentally sound, marriage building, easy, and inexpensive. Whether or not you believe contraception is immoral, NFP certainly has lots of advantages over contraception that are worth your careful and prayerful consideration.

For further reading

Learning NFP
The Art of Natural Family Planning [book] or
CCL Home Study Course [book plus supplies and CCL membership] (Couple to Couple League)

Marriage, Family, and Morality
Humane Vitae (Of Human Life) by Pope Paul VI
Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II] (Ignatius Press)
Original Unity of Man and Woman by Pope John Paul II
Familiaris Consortio (The Role of the Family in the Modern World) by Pope John Paul II
Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II
Charter of the Rights of the Family addressed generally to all men and women and specifically to the United Nations by the Holy See (October 22, 1983)
Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) by Pope John Paul II
The Jeweler's Shop a poetic drama by Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II] (Ignatius Press)
Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later by Janet Smith (Catholic University of America Press)
Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader edited by Janet Smith (Ignatius Press)
Sex and the Marriage Covenant by John F. Kippley (Couple to Couple League)
The Bible and Birth Control by Charles D. Provan [Protestant] (Couple to Couple League)