Questioning the Status Quo of the Pill Changed Our Lives

When my husband Zach and I married in 2003, I, like every one of my girlfriends, began taking the birth control pill without hesitation. It was just something every young married woman did, like any other “to do” on the wedding planning checklist: book florist, select responsorial psalm, pick up birth control prescription… check, check, check! I had no idea what I was putting into my body, how it would affect my health, or why my Church was against it. It wasn’t until two years later when my partner at work began talking with me about NFP, that I decided to look further into the pill. It was the pill’s abortifacient nature that caused me to sign up for a Creighton information session, but the information my husband and I learned in that session changed our entire outlook on our bodies, our marriage, and our life.

I stopped taking the pill the day of that information session, and in addition to our NFP instruction book, Zach and I began reading everything about natural family planning we could get our hands on. This led us to Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae, and then Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. My husband and I were floored by the wealth of wisdom contained in these works and they directly led to my husband’s decision to join the Church. In his words, “It made me think, ‘If the Catholic church is right about this, what else are they right about that I’ve been missing?’” Zach continued to study the teachings of the Church and received the sacraments in 2013.

Since learning the Creighton model system and beginning to practice NFP in 2005, I had a desire to become a practitioner. I experienced several financial and personal obstacles that made it clear that the timing was not right, but I continued to work as a passionate advocate for NFP through my volunteer work within my parish diocese. When in 2016 my pastor approached me about being trained in NFP and becoming a resource for our parish, it was truly an answer to ten years of prayer. I am now in my 13 month internship program and am overjoyed at the opportunity to be professionally trained.

Zach and I have been gifted with four beautiful children, three girls and a baby boy. As our oldest twin daughters approach puberty, we have become more passionate about the need for NFP educators to reach out not only to engaged and married couples, but also to teens and other young people. A complete understanding of our fertility is something that everyone should have. We firmly believe that teaching our youth about the sacredness of their bodies can, little by little, family by family, reverse the tide of sexual permissiveness that is so prevalent today.
It is this belief that has led us to be involved with teaching Theology of the Body for Teens at our parish and with the Mother Daughter program in the Sacramento Diocese.

Being faithful with our fertility, working inside God’s design for our bodies without shutting off the potential blessings that God has waiting for our family, has been and continues to be a foundation for our marriage and further, for our entire household.