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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2008 /  Church promotes NFP for healthy marriages

by Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published October 3, 2008

Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic Laura and Darrin Jennings, parishioners at St. Mary Parish in Milford, first turned to Natural Family Planning for health reasons, and now say it's strengthened their marriage emotionally and spiritually. The Church promotes NFP as the best way to bring life into the world. In the background, the Jenning children (from left) Christa, 5, Alyssa, 10, and Zachary, 7.

Milford — Laura and Darrin Jennings weren't immediately ready to have kids. They had just gotten married, their lives were hectic, and Laura was in the midst of finishing graduate school.

So, like many couples, they turned to the birth control pill. And, as happens at times with the pill, Laura started having disconcerting health complications.

Ask them now, and the Jennings will tell you those side effects were a blessing in disguise — it caused them to find Natural Family Planning, a safe and natural method of avoiding, and later achieving, pregnancy.

NFP didn't just replace the pill. It built a better marriage.

"Once we embraced NFP scientifically to alleviate the symptoms I was having, then we started on our journey to embrace it theologically," says Laura, who 12 years later is a proud mother of three who belongs with her family to St. Mary Parish in Milford. "It actually is biologically better for you and — coincidentally and complimentarily — it's also theologically better for you."

Though not widely known about, NFP might be called the magic bullet answer to a society that now is almost automatically disposed to using artificial contraception.

Centered on the fact that a woman is only fertile between five and eight days per month, the method allows couples to avoid pregnancy at a success rate as high as any pill or barrier, without taking any drugs or putting anything into or on their bodies.

The clichι is that a good, old-fashioned Catholic couple will reject birth control for moral reasons and, as a result, have enough children to fill out a baseball team roster. But — not to be confused with the obsolete "rhythm method" — NFP can be 99-percent effective when used properly. And, importantly, it espouses the respect and dignity for life and for marriage that the Church promotes.

"It is best for marriages. It's best for the couple, health-wise as well as spiritually," says Dorothy Stapel, who with her husband Ben runs the Archdiocese of Detroit Office for Natural Family Planning. "It's the best thing that God has given us. What we find with most couples is that, once they find out what NFP is about, they see it's not just a method to avoid pregnancy — it's a way of life and of truly planning a family so that each child is truly the gift from God."

There are a few different ways of practicing NFP, but all of them center on knowing a woman's fertility cycle. Through charting a woman's body temperature with an oral thermometer, and paying attention to various other signs of fertility, a couple can have a high degree of certainty whether a pregnancy is possible at any given time. It even goes for women with irregular cycles and health complications.

The Church teaches couples about NFP in its marriage preparation classes. More detailed classes on how to use the method also are offered throughout the Archdiocese of Detroit. Once a couple knows how to read the wife's fertility cycle, keeping tabs on the fertile periods can take less than five minutes per day.

Another important aspect of NFP is that husbands are involved in charting their wives' fertility cycles — which opens the door to more honest and prayerful discernment of when to have, and when to avoid having, children. A handful of doctors in the Archdiocese of Detroit even avoid prescribing contraception, and, for health reasons as well as moral ones, encourage patients to use the natural means of family planning.

"What a lot of people suffer from is a lack of understanding," says Dr. Daniel Greene, OB-GYN, who works for a private practice that operates out of Crittenton Hospital in Rochester Hills. "People perceive it as one of two things. One, it's too difficult and it takes too much time. Or, two, it doesn't work — they lump it in with the data from the 1960s, from the rhythm method."

Even in medical school, Greene — who stopped prescribing artificial contraception in 2005 — says NFP isn't given more than a passing mention, or isn't even distinguished from the ineffective rhythm method.

But once people learn the truth, NFP becomes a lot more appealing.

"You can choose between the natural method that works, or an artificial method which — in addition to not being in conjunction with Catholic moral teachings — also has a lot of side effects and problems," Greene says.

Doctors aren't the only ones who might be surprised by learning about NFP's proven effectiveness and ease. Laura and Darrin Jennings were, too — even though Laura teaches high school biology and Darrin teaches high school health classes.

"I was surprised that it was factual, it was organized and it made sense," says Laura, who first heard about it from her sister-in-law. "I was more surprised that I didn't hear about Natural Family Planning before."

For the Jenningses, though, adopting NFP into their marriage made a difference — in fact, all the difference in the world for their youngest child, 5-year-old Christina.

Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic Laura and Darrin Jennings say NFP has helped them prayerfully discern the size of their family. From left: Alyssa, Zachary, Darren – holding Zip, the dog – Laura and Christa.

Six years ago, after Laura and Darrin had what they'd previously agreed would be their ideal situation — a then-5-year-old daughter Alyssa and 2-year-old son Zachary — they were on their front porch, watching their two kids play in the grass, a minivan parked in the driveway. Laura had been praying that their family would grow more still. And she soon got her answer from Darrin.

"He turned to me and said, 'You know what? We bought that minivan, we may as well fill it up,'" Laura said — a testimony now on a DVD the archdiocese has produced to promote NFP. To this day, Laura recounts her story while telling others about NFP — sure that the added strength NFP lent to their marriage was a huge reason they have a beautiful 5-year-old daughter today.

"I left it in the hands of God, and I left that in (Darrin's) heart," she says. "It's a blessing that demonstrates how the power of the Holy Spirit can work in a marriage."