Natural Family Planning: God’s Design and Gift

Details: 26 July 2013

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) established the week of July 21 through July 27 as Natural Family Planning Awareness Week. Although this Week is drawing to a close, the awareness and learning about God’s design for married love and His gift of Natural Family Planning (NFP) must continue.

In my last column I mentioned the excellent educational resources on the USCCB website (www.usccb.org/love-and-sexuality) that provide compelling explanations of God’s awesome design for married love. One of those resources is a 2006 statement by the U.S. Bishops entitled "Married Love and the Gift of Life". This document answers several common questions on this topic. For example:

"What does the Church teach about married love? Marriage is more than a civil contract; it is a lifelong covenant of love between a man and a woman. It is an intimate partnership in which husbands and wives learn to give and receive love unselfishly, and then teach their children to do so as well. Christian marriage in particular is a "great mystery," a sign of the love between Christ and his Church (Eph 5:32).

"Married love is powerfully embodied in the spouses’ sexual relationship, when they most fully express what it means to become ‘one body’ (Gn 2:24) or ‘one flesh’ (Mk 10:8, Mt 19:6). The Church teaches that the sexual union of husband and wife is meant to express the full meaning of love, its power to bind a couple together and its openness to new life.

"What does this have to do with contraception? A husband and wife express their committed love not only with words, but with the language of their bodies. Married love differs from any other love in the world. By its nature, the love of husband and wife is so complete, so ordered to a lifetime of communion with God and each other, that it is open to creating a new human being they will love and care for together.

"Part of God’s gift to husband and wife is this ability in and through their love to cooperate with God’s creative power. Therefore, the mutual gift of fertility is an integral part of the bonding power of marital intercourse. That power to create a new life with God is at the heart of what spouses share with each other.

"Suppressing fertility by using contraception denies part of the inherent meaning of married sexuality and does harm to the couple’s unity. The total giving of oneself, body and soul, to one’s beloved is no time to say: ‘I give you everything I am—except....’ The Church’s teaching is not only about observing a rule, but about preserving that total, mutual gift of two persons in its integrity.

"What is natural family planning? Natural family planning is a general name for the methods of family planning that are based on a woman’s menstrual cycle. A man is fertile throughout his life, while a woman is fertile for only a few days each cycle during the child-bearing years.

"Some believe that NFP involves using a calendar to predict the fertile time. That is not what NFP is today. A woman experiences clear, observable signs indicating when she is fertile and when she is infertile. Learning to observe and understand these signs is at the heart of education in natural family planning.

"When a couple decides to postpone pregnancy, NFP can be very effective. NFP can also be very helpful for couples who desire to have a child because it identifies the time of ovulation. It is used by many fertility specialists for this purpose. Thus a couple can have marital relations at a time when they know that conception is most likely to take place."

There are multiple methods of NFP which are based on the three basic ways a woman’s body indicates the fertile and infertile times of her cycle: cervical mucus, body temperature, and cervical shape or texture. They are Sympto-Thermal (Couple to Couple League, www.ccli.org); Billings Ovulation (Family of the Americas, www.familyplanning.net); Creighton Model, www.fertilitycare.org or www.popepaulvi.com); and the Marquette Method (www.nfp.marquette.edu).

Soon-to-be-saint John Paul II said in his encyclical "The Gospel of Life" that the "trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life." If we desire a transformation of what John Paul II called a "culture of death" into a culture of life and love, we must diligently seek to understand, live and proclaim God’s design for married love.

You can contact Greg at The Nebraska Catholic Conference, 215 Centennial Mall South Suite 310, Lincoln, NE 68508; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.