Natural family Planning and the World

I believe my initial foray into the topic of “Natural Family Planning and the World” goes back to 1982 when I was a senior in college. As a required task for an ethics course I was taking, I wrote a paper on how the Missionaries of Charity (the sisters of Mother Teresa) taught NFP to couples in India. To be sure, I have little recollection of the paper I wrote beyond the vague (and probably inaccurate) memory that I received a good mark. In any case, for this article, I thought I would do what any information-seeking person does these days. I inserted “Natural Family Planning and the Missionaries of Charity” into a search engine.

The first entry in the search engine took me to an article entitled “New Life for Family Planning” written by Michael P. Harris for Time magazine in 2001. After presenting Catholic Church teaching and referring to Humanae Vitae, Mr. Harris reported that the Missionaries of Charity “run an NFP center in Calcutta in a former chemicals warehouse. The sisters have taught the method to 64,000 women in the Indian state of West Bengal. Teachers use everyday agricultural images to explain a woman’s menstrual cycle: seeds are planted during the monsoon, when the soil is soft and moist; cows are inseminated when they produce mucus at the cervix, fertility’s telltale sign. Some women who cannot afford pencil or paper dutifully chart their fertile days in simple symbols drawn with burned wood.” Michael P. Harris, Time, June 24, 2001 Mr. Harris went on to note that using NFP is not always easy. Indeed, even though one has received instruction for it, it is not always lived and used. He noted:

“In India, an estimated 10 million people have been introduced to the Billings method over the past decade. But experts believe that for every five couples who faithfully maintain NFP records and charts, an equal number of husbands and wives trying to practice NFP do not.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Harris did allow a spokesperson for the Catholic Church to have the final say in the article. He quoted Fr. Peter Elliot who at the time served on the Pontifical Council for the Family. (In 2007, Fr. Elliot was made Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, Australia. He retired from that post last November at the age of 75.) Fr. Elliot expressed the wrongness of “contraceptive imperialism” whereby IUDs, pills, anti-fertility vaccines and other products are foisted upon illiterate women without providing them with all the information about their medical dangers. Referring to natural methods of spacing births, Fr. Elliot noted:

“These are not Catholic methods. They are used in Pakistan and China too, but through our morality, we have become the promoters of natural family-planning methods. The church finds she has a mission to the world to make the method of spacing births known.”

Those of us who have “been in the trenches” of Natural Family Planning over the years understand and appreciate these words. Instructors, clergy, parents, educators, physicians teach, preach and live Natural Family Planning not because it works, but because it’s true. (And, yes, it does work too, thank you very much.) Moreover, because it is true, good and beautiful, we want to give it to others. NFP provides a whole world-view of the gift of sexuality. Someday, I hope and pray that the whole world will view NFP as the most healthy, holy and happy way for couples to live God’s design for married love.