Let's go to Ryan in Washington state, listening on EWTN radio. Ryan, welcome to
Catholic Answers Live. Hi, thanks for having me. What's your question, Ryan? So my
question is in regards to natural family planning. I've had with some debates with some of my other
Catholic friends, and while I'm pro- natural family planning, their primary
argument against it is that it's really not an effective form of birth control
and that it doesn't work despite what the Catholics claim. And I was just wondering
if you had any statistics that could speak to that. Yeah that's a common
canard, that it's just like like a fancier phrase
for the "rhythm method;" that it's just basically "Vatican Roulette" and the
people who use it are known as "parents." You address this in your book, you say...
you make it very clear. Yeah. The--depending on which method you use, whether it's
symptothermal or Serena or the Creighton model or the ovulation model; the user
effectiveness is generally reckoned to be between 95 and 97 percent. And in the
case of the symptothermal method, because you're dealing with not
only mucus viscosity--hey I get to say the word "viscosity"--but also daily
temperature, we're talking a really accurate daily biological marker of
what fertility is is happening and when. And this is not dependent on how wild
the woman's cycle is. She can be as irregular as, you know, pick your metaphor,
it doesn't really matter. Now you wanna-- if you have a serious reason to space
children, you want to be a little more conservative about which days before
that fertile day is going to arrive, so you would want to abstain for that. But
the the pill usage, and IUDs, and condoms, generally speaking, are either at--or
certainly condoms are less effective than what natural family planning
can do, and that's from the point of view of avoiding pregnancy. But people
always--this sort of rubs me the wrong way--we shouldn't be talking
about natural family planning as though it's a Catholic
version of really good birth control. "Oh, it's natural." You know what I mean?
Because our fertility is a gift, and if we have a serious reason to
postpone pregnancy, we can do that. However, it's also very effective at producing
babies, for the same reason, that you can zero in. Women are fertile one day a
month. When you know, over a few months, when that's going to be, you can
anticipate it with some greater certainty. I would recommend that you
check out the National Catholic Bioethics Center. I don't have the
scientific journals at my disposal that would give you a statistic that's not,
you know, generated by an apostolate, but the NCB Center has a lot of
science-based, secular-sphere research about how effective it is. And if I can
just mention one more thing, Ryan, just to get away from the biology for a second;
there are two studies that I cite in my book. One is from University of Chicago,
and totally secular based, on the extremely low divorce rate among couples
who use Natural Family Planning. He found it's less than 1 percent. There's an
Austrian doctor named Josef Roetzer who tracked 1,400 married
couples for 20 years--so 1,400 couples, two decades--found a divorce rate of zero.
So there's another built-in natural benefit to living your married life
according to God's plan. And so...but I, you know, people--it's always funny to me,
because I used to think this when I was a dissenter myself from this teaching--I
would say, "Well, it's no different. The Church
is just playing a word game." So someone asked me, "So why shouldn't couples at
least try Natural Family Planning? Just switch? "Well, that's different." Wait a sec. You gotta pick one.
What's different? Because it involves self-mastery, on the NFP side. You
have to say no, or at least you have to have that critical conversation every
month with your spouse. "Honey, are we ready for a new baby or not?" Where, with
contraception, you can just keep throwing a pill or a condom at the problem.
Right. Patrick, if I could just follow up a little bit on your response to Ryan--
Ryan, thank you for the question, excellent one--effectiveness
is really, if I understand what you're saying correctly, is really sort of a
point of departure for a conversation with someone about NFP. That's the--
it is effective, but it's so much more than that.
NFP, in itself has a unitive quality to it. It has the respect for
the natural rhythms of the reproductive cycle. It has the unitive quality between the
husband and the wife. It's also an invitation for the husband to understand
how his wife's body works and the rhythm that she is undergoing every month. It
puts them in greater sync. The husband is able to say, "I understand, honey, because
we're in this together. I know which days you're going to be fertile and which days you're
not." And with naprotechnology, we have-- this is another another benefit--Dr.
Thomas Hilgers in Nebraska diagnosed my wife after looking at her
charts for probably 15 seconds. He diagnosed her problem--I won't go into
what the issues were--but he diagnosed the problem, she underwent a very simple
procedure, and nine months later-- excuse me, just over nine months later we
had our daughter Sophia. Praise God.