‘Living in God’s plan for life and love’

 Diving into natural family planning during NFP Awareness Week

Each year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) designates one week in July as Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week. This year, NFP Awareness Week is being celebrated from July 19-25.

NFP, sometimes referred to as fertility awareness or fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs), is a system of tracking a woman’s fertility signs during her cycle. Within marriage, NFP can be used to help achieve or avoid pregnancy. Lisa Hall, director of Family/Respect Life for the Diocese of Syracuse, shared how NFP helps Catholic couples freely live God’s plan for their marriages and families.

“So many times we think about the Church’s teaching around the issues of life and love as being something that’s imposed on us, something that is negative,” said Hall. “What the Church actually is trying to teach us is that really these things are about saying ‘yes’ to God. … Living in God’s plan for life and love is a ‘yes’ to what God desires for our hearts — to really learn how to live freely, faithfully, fruitfully, and totally in love. … Far from being rules that are imposed on us, God is encouraging and inviting us to see these as ways to learn how to love and how to love like God loves.”

Focusing on women’s health

NFP is also instrumental for identifying and treating many women’s health issues, including hormonal imbalances and fertility concerns. Angela Kristan, MD, a doctor of restorative reproductive medicine, runs the Rochester-based Restore Health and Wellness practice and has helped many Catholic couples navigate the use of NFP in their marriages. Physiology and endocrinology are at the heart of her practice, she said. Although hormonal contraception is not intrinsically evil in the teaching of the Church, and can be licitly used to suppress pain, for example, she sees its use as a last resort.

“As a physician, […] I want to find the actual root cause of the malady and treat that. That’s what restorative reproductive medicine provides — the tools to do just that, to diagnose, to investigate. I [then] have a much better chance of actually providing the patient with a diagnosis,” said Dr. Kristan, also emphasizing the importance of early diagnosis, as many women’s health issues are often masked or are left untreated, making it more difficult to overcome possible fertility challenges later on in life.

Dr. Kristan added that a beautiful aspect of NFP is how women can learn about and be much more in tune with their bodies simply through observing God-given fertility signs. These signs, or observations, are called biomarkers, and they can include tracking the presence of cervical fluid and analyzing urinary metabolites using ovulation predictor kits.

While recognizing the inherent benefits and blessings of NFP and restorative reproductive health, Dr. Kristan said she doesn’t believe in an “us versus them” mentality when considering traditional women’s healthcare that utilizes hormonal contraception. Physicians who aren’t trained in restorative reproductive health methods are “doing the best they can with what they’ve been taught,” she said, and they “really want the best for their patients.

“I want to encourage those same physicians to give restorative reproductive medicine its place,” she continued. “We are meeting a real need. Patients are coming to us not even necessarily from a religious background, but also for concern for the environment … they’re trying to do things more naturally, and so this way of understanding their body and their health makes sense to them. I want us to be able to be equipped to honor that.”

Following God’s plan for marriage

When it comes to using NFP in marriage, often as a means of achieving or avoiding pregnancy, Dr. Kristan said the process makes couples “much more engaged with one another and with the realities of life.”

Couples that use fertility awareness methods have an appreciation for the gift of fertility,” Dr. Kristan continued. “They don’t take that gift for granted. … It’s a much more open and receptive way of living life.”

Kristin Dievendorf, Family Life and NFP program coordinator for the diocesan Family/Respect Life Ministry, also emphasized how NFP can draw couples closer together with one another and with God’s plan for their marriage and their family. Through NFP, they can “make genuine, sincere decisions together as a couple in a way that respects the body, respects God as the author of life, and does not reject that gift,” Dievendorf said.

One couple living out the blessings of NFP in their marriage is Allison and Daniel Olejarnik. Although learning the Creighton Model —the NFP method they chose —wasn’t without its challenges at first, the couple said they are grateful for its role in helping them achieve pregnancy. Through support and encouragement from other married couples using NFP, they found that practicing the Creighton Model of NFP strengthened their relationship and helped them grow closer to God.

“Practicing NFP has strengthened our marriage by increasing communication, especially regarding family planning and our future as a family. It has encouraged us to have intentional conversations about our goals, our values, and all that intimacy entails. Rather than leaving these topics unspoken, NFP has given us opportunities to communicate openly and make decisions together,” shared Allison and Daniel.

The couple also said that practicing NFP has been another way for them to live out their faith together. “NFP has helped us grow in our relationship with God by encouraging us to discern together, as husband and wife, what is best for our family while seeking God’s will. Because NFP works in harmony with the natural design of fertility, it has deepened our appreciation for God’s design for marriage and family,” they explained.

The best time to learn is now

There’s more good news about NFP, too, Dievendorf shared. For couples still in the fertility window before a woman has reached menopause, it’s never too late to start learning and practicing any of the NFP methods.

“There is always room to learn it, and there are different advantages to learning different methods at different times,” said Dievendorf. “I’m more than happy to connect with anyone. The door isn’t closed if they discern at a later time this might be something worth learning, or if they want to come off birth control and they want to learn a method because they’re convicted about the benefits and the fruits of natural family planning.”

The Olejarniks offered encouraging advice to any couple beginning their NFP journey or considering making the switch to an NFP model.

“Our encouragement would be to stick with it, even if it feels challenging at first,” they said. “Learning a new method takes time, but it becomes easier with consistency. For us, the Creighton Model helped us accurately identify [our] fertile window, and we were able to achieve pregnancy fairly quickly when the time was right. We are incredibly grateful that it ultimately led to the beautiful gift of welcoming our child. NFP not only helped us reach our family-planning goals, but it also strengthened our communication and allowed us to approach those decisions together in a way that was consistent with our faith.”

For more information on NFP, to take the quiz to help determine the best model for your family, and for many resources on the related topics of infertility and pregnancy and infant loss, visit https://syracusenfp.org/. If you prefer to speak with someone directly, Kristin Dievendorf can be reached at [email protected] or by calling 315-472-6754 ext. 2. To reach Dr. Angela Kristan and learn more about Restore Health and Wellness, visit https://www.restorehealthroc.org.