Natural Family Planning Week: It’s all about life…

While the Church’s strong belief about the relationship between fertility and marriage and family life may be unfashionable, many people are discovering that this is really the expression of an extraordinarily deep insight into the human person: who we are and how we are really meant to relate to each other.

The Church’s consistently courageous insistence on the significance of our fertility has been the butt of endless bad-taste jokes and jibes. Hardly a day goes by without someone on television, radio or the web seeming to almost sneer at Catholic beliefs about fertility, in particular.
The remarkable news is, however, that growing numbers of people around the world – and not just Catholics – are discovering that medicine and science are increasingly vindicating not the sceptics but rather the Church’s stance. In the last decade, the Chinese government, for example, has begun investing millions in establishing Billings Ovultaion Method centres around the world’s most populous nation after discovering the huge advantages it offers.
The Indian Government was so impressed by field trials involving 100,000 couples in the late 1990s they are going down the same road.
Over the last 20 years Australian natural fertility educators have noted an interesting phenomenon – a steady rise in interest in natural approaches to fertility from those for whom the environment is a key concern – Greens and others of like mind. Increasingly, people are beginning to realise that a woman’s regular indicators of fertility are not an illness that needs to be medicated by contraception and that this should not be a necessary precondition of marriage, a long-term cohabitational relationship, a successful career or a fulfilling life. But almost no-one is offering alternatives other than the relatively small numbers of natural fertility practitioners.
It will take some time for the clear benefits of a natural approach to fertility to gain traction with key communicators such as the media who are usually slow to catch on to really big developments. And then there are the vested interests of multi-national pharmaceutical companies with which to contend.
The Church’s message on fertility is actually rooted in its vision of the dignity of woman and man and in the beauty of spousal love, marriage and family life. What the Church believes – and why – as opposed to what most people think it believes are actually two completely different things. When people discover this, they usually want to know why someone didn’t give them the good news earlier.
In this edition of The Record we have decided to support the nation’s natural fertility educators as best we could, by showcasing some of their remarkable achievements and programmes. These include the great Australian success story of the Billings movement, the Natural Fertility Services movement, and the remarkable developments expressed by the FertilityCare medical clinic now established here in Perth.
It is, we believe, a message worth considering, and sharing. It’s a message that leads to life and happiness.