Natural Family Planning is the Church’s invitation to a world and a culture that sees fertility as a disease, children as an inconvenience, and God as a demanding and withholding moralist. Through these scientific methods that help couples understand a woman’s fertility, the Church proposes a path of family planning that affirms parents as co-creators with God and cooperators in God’s saving plan for humanity.

   Being open to life is hard work. I see a sliver of the challenges every day as I walk with families through different stages of life. There’s the physical and emotional toll of pregnancy, the fear of miscarriage or infant loss, the astronomical expenses, the abundant and intentional time, the inevitable conflicts over dinnertime, bedtime, or literally any other time, and the heartache and grief of infertility if kids don’t appear. Young couples understandably desire peace, stability, freedom and personal growth. However, like with other good desires, it can be warped by the Evil One to convince couples that openness to life is an impossible goal, a theoretically noble ideal proposed by celibate men who couldn’t understand family life. In its place, modern technology proposes artificial birth control in all its forms so that couples can have “planned parenthood” with themselves in the driver’s seat. Whether or not they realize it, many couples come to see pregnancy and children as a risk to be avoided instead of a blessing to be received. They begin to withhold the gift of their fertility from each other, and the conjugal act is cheapened from a total self-gift into a partial self-gift.

   What is the true reality and purpose of marriage? First, to get your spouse to Heaven, which means at least not doing anything that will make them stumble into sin. Second, to cooperate with God in bringing unique, unrepeatable human persons into the world as gifts from God and gifts to God. As the Church teaches, “Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare” (Gaudium et spes 50). How do kids contribute to their parents’ welfare? First, by enabling them to love someone beyond themselves. Next, by reflecting back to them the choice of this self-giving love. Every time a parent looks in their child’s face, they can be reminded of the generous choice they made to bring them into existence. Children are also a sign of their parents’ conjugal unity and a synthesis of their parenthood. While not always keeping families together, children often bring out the best in their parents and challenge them to be great caregivers and spouses in the home. Parents in turn are called to be fruitful, not only in the procreation of children, but in all the moral, spiritual and supernatural life they will hand on through their good example and instruction in the faith.

   “So,” couples might ask, “how many kids should we have?” However many God wants you to bring into the world with your prudent cooperation. Natural Family Planning gives couples the necessary tools to space births, but the couple must discern with God in prayer how to do so responsibly. To be open to procreative life brings with it an openness to life in its fullness, and parents testify that they can’t imagine life without their children, even if the work is hard. So to couples, I say: Do not be afraid, God is with you, and you were born for this!

   -Fr. Stephen