natural family planning Archives

Co-Creation With God

Growing up, I would often ask my mom to “Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.” She would remind me, instead, that she wanted me to look around and see what needed to be done and who needed a hand. I wanted a checklist; she wanted me to develop…

Tips for the Engaged and Charting

We are an engaged couple preparing for marriage. My fiancé and I are Catholic and talked a lot about our beliefs when we were first dating. One of those was Natural Family Planning (NFP). When we first got engaged, I made an appointment with a doctor who upheld Catholic teachings in her practice — including…

More than just a Fertility Awareness Method

I love that the Couple to Couple League (CCL) has never just taught the Sympto-Thermal Method. Why? Because to practice a fertility awareness method of family planning successfully, you need more than head knowledge. CCL has always been structured to provide whatever couples need live out the call to marital love as God designed. And…

More Evidence that Periodic Abstinence is Good for Marriage

New research confirms that despite the challenge of periodic abstinence, the use of natural family planning can be beneficial for marital relationships. The study, “Natural Family Planning and Marital Chastity: The Effects of Periodic Abstinence on Marital Relationships” (Linacre Quarterly, June 12, 2020) by Richard J. Fehring, PhD, RN, and Michael D. Manhart, PhD, found…

Learning NFP? Start with Sympto-Thermal

OK, you’ve been hearing about fertility awareness-based methods. You like that they are safe and healthy. But how do you know which method to learn? You could search online to find advice or surveys that help match a method to your personality, lifestyle or needs. There’s good logic behind that. But I recommend everyone start…

Twitter User Delivers Outstanding Defense of NFP

Social media’s not exactly designed for important conversations. Between the anonymous accounts and the trolls, it can be hard to tell what is real and important — after all, much of our approval-addicted society values likes over content. If regular social media is bad, Twitter is even worse. It’s the drug of choice for people…

FINALLY: CDC’s FABM Numbers Change

They finally did it! After years of citing misleading and inaccurate effectiveness ratings for natural family planning methods, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) has updated their website, Natural Womanhood announced yesterday. But is it the change we were hoping for? Formerly, the CDC cited a methodologically-flawed study which unfairly grouped FABMs with other…

Charting Through Mental Illness

From the Family Foundations archives **** One in five. That’s the best estimate of the number of adults who suffer from a “diagnosable mental disorder” in any given year. Anxiety disorders are the most common, and often pair with depression. These conditions can make practicing NFP excruciatingly difficult. Jenna Hines, a 31-year-old NFP user from Chelsea, Michigan,…

What You Don’t Know can Kill You

March is Blood Clot Awareness Month, an opportunity for valuable information about the risky condition to get into the hands of those who need it most. So how much have you heard about it in the media? More important, how many teenage girls and young women do you think are hearing about the dangers of…

Cleveland Professionals Get the FACTS

On Saturday, February 23, more than 80 area doctors, medical students and passionate laypeople gathered at the Hilton DoubleTree Hotel just outside Cleveland, Ohio. The issue at hand was women’s health, but not the way society at large tends to think of it. This conference wasn’t about increasing popular access to contraceptives or abortion. Quite…