NFP: The good, the bad, the ugly (part 1)

For the last week, natural family planning has been as hot a topic as it ever is, because it was NFP week. Of course, I didn’t write about it last week because I am a person who responds to the world, not a person who gets ahead of trends.

Most people ignore NFP posts because they’ve already made up their minds on the topic. But I’m asking you to stick with me. Please?

NFP has been part of my life as long as I can remember. My mom had a big chart with room for baby stickers taped to the back of her bedroom door. Creighton, I learned, when I started infertility treatment with a Napro doctor and was asked to learn to chart that method.

My own adulthood has been structured around sympto-thermal NFP as taught by the Couple to Couple League. A year into our marriage, we went through certification to teach the method ourselves and we did so for sixteen years. Really, we only quit because the priests weren’t sending people to us, and we were tired of fighting that battle when there were so many disability battles to fight. But I have fond memories of our little ones playing “spy” around the edge of the couch while we taught.

In case anyone is actually reading this who doesn’t already know (unlikely): natural family planning, referred to in the secular community as fertility awareness methods, involves tracking the signs of a woman’s fertility so as to identify when conception is or isn’t possible, and planning your choices around intimacy accordingly.

NFP was never a walk in the park for us. My family has a history of polycystic ovaries (I know they just changed the name, but that’s how I know it), which means we had some unpleasant times.

For good or for ill—and I would guess that almost always it’s both/and, not either/or—NFP is a practice that really forces couples to face the issues surrounding their mutual sexuality head-on. When you have a cycle variation of 22-52, as I did for a time early in our marriage, you end up with some ugly-long periods of abstinence. Let me tell you, it’s going to bring all the issues to the front. The physical ones (why IS that cycle variation so vast? Something is not right), but also the mental/emotional ones (there’s a whole Substack about that now).

I think this is good. It’s not easy, but it’s good. We live in a sex-saturated culture, and I suspect that a lot of the reason is because people don’t have the sexual life they want, and they’re trying to figure it out. My theory is that we all, religious or not, NFP or not, are struggling with how to live sexuality in a healthy and fulfilling way. The plethora of articles and how-tos and the pervasiveness of steamy romance and sex scenes in the movies is all a manifestation of that. I remember this one guy in grad school who could turn anything into a sexual reference. When I expressed aggravation that I couldn’t speak freely around him, someone said to me, “I think the people who talk the most about sex are the ones who actually have the least of it.”

Sex is hard to get right. That’s my take. People of faith target LGBTQ issues a lot these days, but I mean, heteros have never gotten it right, either. It’s not like heteros have some corner on virtue. That’s another post entirely, but I’m pressed for time and writing this mostly stream-of-consciousness today, so let’s put a pin in that one.

NFP is not easy. It’s a cyclic frustration that my interest in intimacy is highest when we are barred from coming together if we don’t feel we can add another child.

And of course, it’s tempting to want to slap the pill on it to fix everything, but it really doesn’t fix it. If the hormones, in whatever form, actually do their job and suppress ovulation, you can say bye-bye to that time of increased sex drive, too. Sex always comes with consequences. Always. (I wrote a short post on that a few years ago that’s worth a visit.)

But things that are not easy are often the very things that bring us the most good, long term. I will forever be grateful for COVID, because it brought questions of mental health to a head and made it impossible to gloss over them. It was awful, but my entire family is more emotionally and mentally healthy now because we had to face things that might have been glossed over for a lifetime, if not for the stress of lockdown. Therapy and medication have been normalized for my children, and people, that’s no small blessing.

NFP is the same way. You end up confronting your broken places. Marriage is meant to be a bond between people who are spiritually and emotionally free to choose love, again and again, day by day for the rest of their lives. For couples like that--emotionally healthy couples--NFP offers an invitation to grow.

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Now, of course, not everyone is healthy. Where a person already tends toward control of another or manipulation, there is potential for real harm. I don’t have answers for that conundrum. All I can say is that just like everything else in Christian life, NFP is an ideal to be striven toward. #metoo showed the dark underbelly of obsession with sex. Of unequal burden in sexual relationships.

But for this flawed but mostly emotionally healthy woman and her husband, NFP has offered opportunities to plan our family in harmony with the biological processes God put into place. It has, at the same time, put us face to face with our flaws and our wounds and given us strong motivation to work toward healing as well as greater holiness. To become freer to love as God loves.

NFP has also allowed us to plan a family without dumping unnecessary pharmaceuticals into the environment—a passion of mine ever since discovering that our infertility was a result of lawn and agricultural chemicals in the water supply. This is no small thing.

We still use NFP today, an unbroken chain of nearly 27 years. I’m on chart 295. So yes, I believe in the Church’s wisdom in this area.

BUT ALSO, that’s not the whole story. Not by a long shot. So come back next week.

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Next weekend, I’ll be in the St. Louis Metro-East area. Come out for “Stories of our Faith” at St. Nicholas Parish in O’Fallon, Illinois, at 6 p.m. on Aug. 2nd!