NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING: Ensuring Couples Make Healthy and Moral Choices

For parishioner Beth Gilb, Natural Family Planning (NFP) is more than just something that the church encourages its members to use — it is also a way to support others in their lives and a way to help support her own family as well. Beth is a FertilityCare Practitioner who teaches the Creighton Model of Natural Family Planning. NFP is a safe and beneficial way for couples to track a woman’s cycles and use this information to either achieve or avoid pregnancy.

“I first learned NFP when I was single,” Beth says. “I was so excited about the knowledge that I gained. It was so eye-opening. I wish that it was something I had learned as a teenager. I would love to someday set up a program for mothers and daughters so they can learn about their bodies!”

For Beth and her husband, Jeremy, NFP has impacted their life beyond it being a job that Beth utilizes to help others.

“I knew that I had some underlying issues,” she says. “We first used NFP to avoid pregnancy at the beginning of our marriage. After six months of trying to conceive, we worked with a NaPro doctor to treat endometriosis and low progesterone so we could get pregnant.”

A NaPro doctor is a doctor who has been trained and certified by the Saint Paul VI Institute to offer Natural Procreative Technologies to their patients. They seek to diagnose and understand the underlying problems and treat them to restore health instead of masking or suppressing the symptoms of the problems.

“Oral contraceptives are frequently given to women experiencing problems with their cycles — but this just masks the problem,” Beth says. “When we use NFP methods to track the cycle, we can work to get to the root of the issue instead. There is this constant ‘fight’ with mainstream society and medical doctors because they so frequently jump to treat women’s health issues with drugs. We know so many people who were on the pill because a doctor told them that was what was best. Also, the world treats fertility as a problem and not as a beautiful gift that we have been given. So there is this uphill battle because medically, this is not the best. Then the other side of it is the moral and spiritual battle.”

The Catholic Church encourages the use of NFP to plan the timing and number of children that a couple has because we believe that love should be fruitful, faithful, total and free. Using contraceptives withholds a part of a person in the relationship — couples do not give totally of themselves. With the practice of Natural Family Planning, they do not withhold their fertility from each other.

“I think it is very interesting that couples who practice NFP have a divorce rate less than five percent,” Beth says. “Comparatively, couples who use contraceptives report an over 50-percent divorce rate.”

The Church, in Her wisdom, understands how important this total giving of oneself in the Sacrament of Marriage is.

“I really try to surrender to the Holy Spirit about what I should say to couples in each session to guide them and teach them the truth of the beauty of NFP,” Beth says. “This ministry allows me to help teach people the truth. NFP can be very challenging, but it is truly the healthy and moral choice.”

Beth Gilb with her husband, Jeremy, and daughters, Lillian and Abigail

Beth Gilb