Guest Commentary: Thoughts on NFP

I’ve been engaged in some correspondence with a reader of this blog whose comments are so reasoned and insightful I wanted to offer them as a post.

Guest Commentary: My Thoughts on NFP, by Andrea Lefebvre

I think you've raised a good question: basically, why don't people just not use anything? I agree that in marriage prep they can encourage a greater generosity in family life.

As a woman in the middle of child-bearing years and who grew up with the “planned mentality”, I believe it is important for couples to have some awareness of NFP even if they are not intending to "plan” their children. My reasoning here is that medical professionals have a lot of influence and will be pushing contraception on these couples. My husband and I have not really used NFP to prevent pregnancy except during one short period in our marriage. However, after my fourth pregnancy, I came to realize that I was stepping out of general society’s comfort zone; now I have to deal with comments everywhere I go with my children. I also have to deal with medical pressures. After I delivered my fourth child, the discharge nurse at the hospital made sure I knew that breastfeeding did not work as a contraceptive. In the 6-week postpartum check-up with the doctor, one of the primary focuses was contraception.

If I wasn't confident in understanding NFP, I would have found these confrontations far more imposing. I am also a nurse, so I am well-educated and well-informed regarding my "options." In these conversations with medical professionals, I like to tell them, "I have enough knowledge of my fertility that if for any reason my husband and I need to no longer have children, we have the knowledge and will-power not to." One of the things I do to support the Catholic women around me who are also having children is to help prepare them to deal with these pressures.

If marriage preparation classes don't offer any NFP instruction, the medical professionals will not remain silent. I think perhaps NFP has had to spend the last 60 years proving itself; perhaps now is the time to take on new directions.

In respect to the idea that NFP may sometimes act as a “gateway drug”, I agree that this might be the case if people are using it with a contraceptive mentality. People who may have an unintended pregnancy are not likely to have confidence with NFP again. Yet I have also seen the use of NFP prove useful in the journey of greater conversion to openness to life. Couples weaning themselves off artificial contraception find themselves to be so much more vulnerable by using NFP, and they seem always to shift towards a greater openness to life; it’s been beautiful to observe this. It is also usually a step in the pursuit to discover God's plan for family life.

I also agree that “serious reasons” are not emphasized very often. Much is left to the couple to attempt to discern “serious reasons” without direction from an objective source.

Some spacing is important in some circumstances; one of my friends has used NFP very effectively to space her children due to all her children being delivered via c-section. The 2-year spacing has allowed her to continue having a large family. I also know a woman who has 7 children all by c-section; she spaced them accordingly through all her childbearing years so she could have as many as possible.

NFP requires more abstinence than 8-11 days. During breastfeeding and weaning, if a couple is choosing to space their children, they usually have to abstain for quite a long time – longer than comfortable – which requires great sacrifice most particularly for husbands. Until a woman returns to ovulation, there is no “honeymoon period” in the cycle. When I work with couples who are trying to prevent pregnancy, I do mention that it requires sacrifice to not conceive because God has naturally ordered it for us to conceive. I also teach that people need to “own” their sexuality to practice NFP; husbands and wives struggle through and grow in respect for each other.

I have read a book on married saints and while they did not know NFP, some were known to have periodic continence during Lent and Advent and other times during their marriage. I particularly think of St Louis IX of France and Margaret of Provence from around 1234. [Editor’s note: Regarding abstinence during Lent and Advent, there is a qualitative difference from NFP: the period of continence is defined by the liturgical cycle of the Church rather than the fertility cycle of the couple. Even in instances of saintly married couples observing periodic continence for other reasons, they simply abstained, rather than plan their marital embraces around the woman’s fertile periods.]

TEENSTAR, the NFP program associated with the Billings Method, teaches abstinence and an understanding of the body that leads to chastity through teaching teens about their bodies. I think we need to teach teens that their sexuality is ordered towards family life. Many women my age were never affirmed or nurtured toward motherhood, and it makes it a more dramatic experience. Many men seem much less responsible and accountable to their actions. [Editor’s note: I think this hits the nail on the head; due to the availability of artificial contraception for teens, the sexual act has been divorced from its rightful end – procreation.]

One of my biggest problems with Natural Family Planning is that it is called “family planning”. I am an accredited Billings instructor; in the course of working with a woman who had an "unplanned pregnancy”, I realized society’s thinking around having children in general is disordered. There is now a stigma on "unplanned" children, regardless of whether people are married or not. When I am pregnant and people ask me whether it was planned, if I get the opportunity I say, “What is ‘planned’? My husband and I have set our lives up so that we could have children; that is the plan."

An observation I have made is that amongst my Catholic friends only a few came from families who used NFP, usually the Billings Method. Of the others, the majority all came from families that contracepted or sterilized. Many of these friends still practice their faith to some extent, but they don’t recognize the problem in not embracing the teachings of the church. Amazingly, the families that used NFP for their whole marriage did produce vocations, and usually all the children of the family have kept the faith. Honestly, I found something fundamentally different in these homes; I think one aspect was that the parents were obedient to the Church, and I think they received graces for this even though they may have only had 4 or 5 children. I know of two families who were “providentialist”, and similarly their children that I know seem to have all kept their faith.

A note on numbers of children in a family: I’ve spoken to many seniors in our parish who had anywhere from 0-10 children, and many say that’s just what they ‘had’. Another problem with the contraceptive mentality is that people think women will get pregnant at the drop of a hat. The truth is that no woman can know how fertile she is or how many children she will have (i.e., how many children God is calling her to have.) From what I have learned, most women on average would have 5 or 6 children if they used nothing at all to limit or space births. I believe there is research on this, but I have not looked into it; however, I have confirmed it in my own research through listening to seniors and others in my parish.

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Here are my own concluding thoughts:

There seems to be quite a stigma against "just having babies", and the medical profession tends to push the contraceptive mentality of our society; it is very difficult for young couples to overcome the pressure from the family doctor. Add to that the pressures from within the Catholic community; even here we find the negative comments about large families, and the notion that a couple should be “pray and discern” whether they should be open to pregnancy each month. These couples are  facing an uphill battle against the prevailing opinion of society!

Yet, we already know God’s will for married couples: they are to be open to life, unless a serious reason exists to avoid pregnancy. Another commenter noted (my emphases):

Discernment? Or pressure?

In fact, married couples don’t have to prayerfully consider whether they should have another child unless they are practicing NFP to avoid a child, in which case they have a moral obligation to prayerfully discern each month [whether] they still have a serious reason.

We must remember that our true home is in Heaven, and we must use our time here on earth to take us a little further along the path that leads us to God. We grow in virtue and holiness by conforming ourselves to God's will, not by conforming "God's plan" to our will. We have lost a sense of what it truly means to sacrifice for the Kingdom. Having a large family involves willingness to sacrifice, but I believe the benefits are huge.