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By Amber Watson
Do you want to add adventure to your marriage? Do you desire to deepen your relationship with your spouse? Do you want to join thousands of other couples in a countercultural movement to know and appreciate fertility? If so, Natural Family Planning is for you!
If there were to be a jingle or an ad about Natural Family Planning (NFP), it might sound something like the paragraph above. However, unlike popular medications, foods and drinks, toys, TV shows, etc., NFP is not commonly advertised as a socially approved topic. Even in the Catholic world, the acronym “NFP” is often met with wariness and resistance. To some, it is seen as not effective, not necessary with medical advancements, and even detrimental to marriage as it sometimes requires the all-feared period of abstinence.
In opposition to the assumed negativity of NFP, it can positively be described as a means to deepen marital love, understand more deeply how God created us and build virtue. As we approach “NFP Awareness Week,” I would like to share some of the many benefits of NFP including how the use of NFP can positively impact physical health, marriage, family life and even the spiritual life.
I was first introduced to NFP through involvement at the St. Thomas More Newman Center at USD in Vermillion. Learning more about the way God created our bodies fascinated me. The fact that God created us to have times of both fertility and infertility within the cycle and allows us, the creation, to cooperate with him, the Creator, in creating new life amazed, and still amazes, me! I also was intrigued by the Church teaching regarding family planning. Learning how the Church calls married couples to remain open to life while prayerfully discerning God’s will made sense to me, particularly since, with the use of NFP, we know times of fertility and infertility in each cycle.
The gift of NFP allows couples to achieve or avoid pregnancy based on continuous discernment of their family. At times, couples may use NFP to space pregnancies or avoid pregnancy due to life circumstances or medical reasons. NFP also assists couples in achieving pregnancy, as the couple knows their time of fertility. While using NFP, couples remain open to life, even if the couple has discerned that they are not being called to have more children at a particular time.
I was enthusiastic to learn a method of NFP while my husband and I were engaged almost 13 years ago. I desired to learn more about my body and share that gift with my husband and have the ability to follow God’s plan for our marriage. As we grew in knowledge of fertility, we experienced a deeper understanding of how God created us and his amazing gift of allowing us to participate in his creation.
This awoke in me a desire to share this gift with other women and couples. Because of this, I felt called to teach the NFP method that we use. For the past eight years, I have been blessed to teach engaged and married couples about the gift of their cycles of fertility and how that knowledge can be used to follow God’s plan for their family. I have also taught single women who wish to know more about their bodies or want to learn the method to seek medical assistance.
Along with knowing times of fertility and adhering to Church teaching regarding family planning, NFP can strengthen marital unity. We can discover ways in which NFP can deepen the bonds of love between a husband and wife referencing the four pillars of love: free, total, faithful and fruitful.
Free: When a couple uses NFP, they are freely giving of themselves to each other and to God’s plan for their family. Virtue is necessary to freely love. NFP provides the opportunity for us to grow in the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. In our experience, NFP has particularly helped with growth in the virtues of prudence and temperance, which allow us to love each other more freely. Choosing to use NFP has also given us the opportunity to grow in communication. While it is not always easy in practice to follow the instructions of the method, there is joy to be found while following God’s will in freedom.
Total: Choosing to use NFP allows us to give each other the complete gift of ourselves, including our fertility. By not withholding fertility, we are better able to grow in union of mind, will and body. As Pope St. John Paul II is quoted, “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” One of the things from our marriage preparation that still sticks out to me was our priest’s mantra of “babies and bonding.” By God’s design, these two cannot be separated in a properly ordered marriage. With the use of NFP, we are able to give the total gift of ourselves while embracing God’s plan for marriage.
Faithful: NFP assists married couples in remaining faithful to their wedding vows and to God. NFP also allows us to deepen our relationship by finding new, creative ways of loving each other, particularly during times of abstinence. By focusing on different areas of our relationship, like planning quality time or completing a household project together, and actively trying to serve each other in the small things, such as volunteering for the dreaded task of spending an evening folding kids’ clothes or anticipating each other’s needs, we grow in both faithfulness and love. At times, using NFP helps us to acknowledge the struggle of loving in our broken world and prompts a needed discussion of how we can love each other better.
Fruitful: The couple using NFP is consistently being open to life. Even when using an NFP method to avoid pregnancy, we are still following God’s design of the woman’s body. Greater appreciation for the gift of fertility and God’s incredible work of creating new life through and with us is another fruit of delving into a method of NFP. The use of NFP, apart from the fruitfulness of children, can also bear fruit in our spiritual life. The discernment, surrender and trust involved when using NFP help us encounter God, his love and how he desires what is best for us. I have found that when our plans do not exactly line up with God’s plan, for instance in our experience when it took us much longer to conceive our first child than we hoped or when a couple of our children were conceived a little sooner than we anticipated, God was inviting me into a deeper trust in his perfect, loving plan.
Much like entering the sacrament of marriage, using NFP is not for the faint of heart. It takes firm resolve to learn a method and continue its use. Virtue is needed to persevere in love during times of abstinence or hardship, including the suffering of infertility and miscarriage. Despite the challenges it can impose, NFP can deepen marital unity and remind us of the high calling of the vocation of marriage—that marriage is not simply a lifelong fellowship and support. As a sacrament, marriage provides the grace to become holy and attain the ultimate goal of heaven. Using NFP reminds us that our marriage and our family life is not ours. It is all a gift from our Creator who draws us to himself, to his perfect love, which alone can fulfill us.
Amber Watson is a Certified FertilityCare Practitioner (CFCP) for the Creighton Model FertilityCare System. She is a parishioner of Sacred Heart Parish in Aberdeen with her family.
