NFP has many good things going for it. If a couple needs to avoid, it’s the only way they can do so and still have sexual relations. It can also help couples conceive babies they’d otherwise not have. It can be a very, very great blessing to a marriage.
The thing is, it’s not always an unqualified blessing, and like anything except total abstinence, it is going to fail sometimes. Most of us who have a more pragmatic view about it realize that. For the record, I’m known among my Catholic friends as the person to go to about NFP questions because, yes, I read about it a lot, and if I don’t know the answer to something, I’ll tell them to ask an instructor and point them to one. I see NFP as a tool in the marital tool chest, so to speak–not an unqualifiedly perfect thing like chocolate
, but also not an unqualifiedly hard or bad thing like, say, DH having to take a month-long work trip.
What gets me very, very angry about it are two things.
First, during postpartum, a woman’s fertile signs are usually all over the place, and unless you use hormonal testing, all the signs are subjective. You can’t use temperature except to determine ovulation after the fact, which is fine if you’re in normal cycles but not if you are waiting for a return of cycles. Ergo, if you use the method the CCL and the Kippleys promote, that leaves either cervical position or cervical mucus, which are, as I said, subjective observations. Regular observations simply do not work as well during this period because neither source follow a discernable pattern.
Second, the combination of the insistence that this method of NFP is foolproof and works for every family and situation (it doesn’t) with making the standards by which it is effective literally impossible for most women (see previous comment about napping with the non-scheduled baby) make it an area where a lot of women suffer. “You can’t reach this impossible standard? Well, that’s because you’re selfish/didn’t try hard enough!” “You didn’t breastfeed? You have a serious moral obligation to breastfeed! If you just tried hard enough, it would work, because it has throughout history! Only Bad Catholic Mothers work, or have breasts that don’t produce enough milk, or aren’t able to figure out how to get their five-year-old to entertain herself for three hours while caring for the toddler while Mommy naps!”
Couples deserve truth in advertising. They should be hearing something like “NFP works for a lot of people, but it also involves a fair amount of abstinence in order to be effective. It’s the only alternative to total abstinence that’s acceptable in church teaching if you need to avoid conception for a time. Here are the four primary methods out there and how they work; you figure out what works best for you at this time in your lives, and contact the appropriate instructor for help. It can be very hard, but it does reap benefits in terms of the graces you get for avoiding mortal sin.”
That’s truth in advertising.
Insisting that something that rarely works as advertised always works as advertised and then shaming those for whom it doesn’t work leaves people feeling betrayed. The fact that marketers of hormonal contraception engage in deceitful strategies is no excuse for our doing so.
This is not helpful to the OP. ***