Natural Family Planning Corner

An excerpt from “The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning,” by Simcha Fisher. (used with permission, all rights reserved)

So if you, O faithful Catholic spouse, are experiencing some disenchantment—if you find yourself wishing that you could, for once, just ditch these awkward, inharmonious shenanigans called “the fertile years”—if you wish you could just take a break and enjoy some of that easy-peasey secular sex for a change—then think again. Because there is no such thing.

Don’t read the talking points about contraception from mainstream medical websites or Planned Parenthood; and don’t read dire, hand-wringing what’s-the-world-coming-to posts by pro-lifers. Instead, read chatty blogs and unfiltered comments from actual people who contracept as a way of life, speaking frankly to like-minded people. First prepare yourself for some nasty language and ugly ideas, but then tolle et lege [Latin: take and read] et start feeling sane and normal again…

Google “birth control didn’t work.”

Google “birth control makes me crazy.”

Google “contraception” + “relationship problems.”

Google “hormonal birth control” + “lost sex drive…”

And read articles in hip, edgy, in-your-face magazines for women. Read any article, positive or negative, having to do with birth control, and then read the comments. See what happens when one woman says that she had a bad experience: see whether other women stick up for her, or if they keep on defensively trotting out the party line that birth control is necessary, birth control is inevitable, birth control (and bleeding, and losing hair, and chronic bacterial infections, and depression, and cramping, and nausea, and severe mood swings, and weight gain, and loss of sex drive, and memory loss, and vaginal cysts, and blood clots, and and and) is something that empowers women—something that makes normal life possible.

Read up, and ask yourself if it seems normal and rational for so many women to be suffering this way. Ask yourself how it would help your relationship to be going through these things, and to have your husband watching it happen. Remind yourself that, even if you’re suffering with NFP, at least you’re being honest: at least you’re dealing with the real effects of real sex, head on.

You have chosen the better part.

The point of reading about the other side is not to scare yourself straight, and the point is not to look down on anybody. The point is to remind yourself that, when it comes to facing fertility, all God’s children got angst. Take it from women on the front lines: there is no easy way to sidestep fertility. The only way to make sex simple is to opt out entirely.

Are you having a hard time with NFP? Well, that is what sex is like sometimes, especially if you’ve allowed your conscience to develop in any meaningful way. It’s not a Catholic problem; it’s a fallen world problem. Anyone who says differently is selling something that is likely to be the object of a class action medical lawsuit in ten years.

NFP: it’s the worst possible system, expect for all the others.

“The point is to remind yourself that, when it comes to facing fertility, all God’s children got angst.”

Simcha Fisher is the mother of 10 children and writes from New Hampshire. The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning is available nationwide.