As I wrote about several weeks ago, the marital act is the most personal and vulnerable action you can perform with your spouse. This union of body and soul requires that you bring your whole self with you to the marriage bed. If it’s isolated from other forms of affection or intimacy, or if takes place without good communication before and after, it can easily lead down unhealthy avenues. Even if the relationship doesn’t become abusive in the legal sense, many couples find sex in marriage to be unsatisfying and frustrating. How would I know? Let’s just say that I often hear about the struggles of married life in sacramentally confidential settings! Beyond the general guidelines for every couple, I’d like to briefly address younger couples with a solution that can help them learn about their bodies, grow in intimate communication with their spouse, and become co-creators with God. The solution? Natural Family Planning (NFP for short).

   God made sex for bonding and babies. When either of those two purposes is thwarted, the act of sex becomes twisted. Artificial birth control frustrates the essentially procreative dimension of marital intercouse, and so the Church has chosen instead to promote natural forms of family planning that respect God’s design for marriage and our true flourishing. Natural Family Planning is a group of scientific methods that enable a couple to practice responsible parenthood within God’s plan for married love. These scientific methods focus on the different phases of a woman’s reproductive cycle and track its development. While not getting into the specifics of each model, they track biological markers such as body temperature, cervical mucus viscosity, and hormones like LH and estrogen metabolites to assess the relative fertility or infertility of the woman on that given day. By tracking these markers over the months, couples can discover with decent precision when they should abstain or unite to achieve or postpone pregnancy.

   Why should a couple practice Natural Family Planning? Reasons abound, both for Catholics and non-Catholics. For all young couples, the methods of NFP are the most authentic and humane way to learn about one’s own fertility and discover its life-giving potential. The use of chemical and plastic barriers to fertility contradicts the focus of younger generations on clean food, clean water, and clean air for healthy living. Couples that practice NFP often have better communication in and out of the marriage bed because they need to be talking intentionally about their sex life more frequently than couples that use artificial birth control. Periodic abstinence during fertile phases of a woman’s cycle can also teach couples self-discipline to love more selflessly and find myriad ways to express their marital affection for one another. In addition to those general reasons, Catholic couples that practice NFP more consciously act as co-creators with God in their fertility, and they surrender the ultimate gift of their fertility to Him. They exercise prayerful and responsible decision-making when assessing when to have another child, but the entire process actually acknowledges that it’s God who gives life.

   I hope that this explanation gives you some ideas of the beauty of God’s plan for our fertility, and I’m happy to connect you with resources so you can learn more. Everyone knows couples that need the good news of sex and marriage that the Church offers, so spread that news today!

   -Fr. Stephen