NFP Usage vs Contraception Usage

From October 13th – 15th, Sheila St. John and I participated in a “NFP Leaders’ Summit” in Baltimore, MD, organized by Dr. Theresa Notare, the Assistant Director for the Natural Family Planning Program at the Secretariat for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. That’s a mouthful, I know. Basically, the Summit was an opportunity to bring together a number of different organizations throughout the country whose goal is to promote Natural Family Planning (NFP). Organizations which promote the education of the different NFP methods, such as Billings, FertilityCare and Sympto-Thermal, were represented as well as groups which exist to promote NFP in general, such as Natural Womanhood, and of course, CANFP.

Gathering all these groups and having them explore ways to work together to promote the good news of NFP in the U.S. was no small task. The mission of the Summit was stated as follows: “To engage NFP leadership in order to foster community, a shared purpose, and common language in NFP ministry that evangelizes and promotes God’s design for married love.” I would say, we got off to a good start in fulfilling this mission, but there is still more work to do. The format of the Summit included presentations by a few of the participants, as well as group discussion and deliberation. One of the presentations that made its biggest impression on me was a re-cap of the statistics of NFP usage vs. contraception usage in the U.S. I imagine that for most of the Summit participants the information was a review. I have to confess that the stats were a revelation. Indeed, I found them shocking.

One of the slides of the presentation noted that in 2017, of all the married couples in the U.S., with women from the ages of 15 to 44, 10.7% of the couples used the contraceptive pill, 30.5% relied on permanent sterilization, 12.0% engaged in relations using a prophylactic and 1.3% of the couples used periodic abstention (and of those, only .5% used a modern method of NFP). In 2017, of all the Catholic married couples in the U.S., with women from the ages of 15 to 44, 9.5% of the couples used the pill, 28.4% underwent sterilization, 12.70% engaged in prophylactic relations and 1.3% of the couples used periodic abstention to space out the births of their children. (Note that these percentages add up to around 50%. Of the remaining 50%, roughly 20% used a variety of other forms of contraception, and 30% were not currently using any kind of birth control or NFP.) As a Catholic priest, I could not help but blame myself for the fact that when it comes to NFP and contraception usage, there was barely any difference in the practice of the Catholic married couples and the non-Catholic married couples. In other words, married Catholics contracept and sterilize at the same high rate as the general married couple population. I was shocked and saddened by this.

Once again, the study’s statistics reminded me that if we don’t get God’s plan for marriage and family right when it comes to making babies, many evils follow that are not good for our world, such as abortion, divorce, pornography, same-sex and other-sex relations outside of marriage and gender dysphoria, to name a few. I realize that is a sweeping statement. But think about it for a moment. At the heart of NFP and fertility appreciation are chastity, self-mastery, discipline and respect. We live in a “throw-away” culture, as Pope Francis says. When it comes to marriage and the family, we cannot afford to treat God’s design for marriage, family and marital fruitfulness as something that is thrown away and cast off. All of us are called to something much greater. Until we are “on the other side” we have much to do to proclaim the good news of NFP. I, for one, am glad to be in such wonderful company as we make this journey together, whether it be with the participants I met at the Baltimore Summit or with all of you in the trenches throughout California.