How Natural is NFP?
If you’re using NFP, chances are you’ve encountered well-meaning friends or family that wish to express their concern over your choice of family planning. The issue of whether or not one should pry into such a private matter remains for another topic, but I hope to address one argument that is sometimes thrown at people trying to live NFP. Perhaps you weren’t even sure how to respond to this one: Is NFP really that much more “natural” than other forms of birth control?
After all, there is the laborious time and attention taken to one’s charting and interpretation. There is the aligning of your sex life with the defined fertile or infertile times, based on how you’re using it. That sometimes doesn’t feel very natural. And then there is that thermometer you have to pop in your mouth every morning. Isn’t that an artificial “device”, much the same as a condom, or IUD? And what about all those great charting apps you can use to store your cycle history? You don’t see any of the above waving around in the breeze of a grassy meadow, ripe for the plucking. Nope, they’re right, the thermometer and apps can be thrown in with the rest, all produced from technology and definitively “artificial”. But we don’t try to deny it. Those of us who practice NFP aren’t against all things artificial.
What Does “Natural” Mean?
So what then, does the “N” in NFP stand for? Often people misunderstand what “natural” means. They might assume it just means “easy”, in the same sense of breathing. Breathing doesn’t require any thought or self-control. It just happens. Shouldn’t NFP just “happen”, too, if it really made sense?
But we have to understand the definition of “natural”, as it is applied here. Natural means “congruent with our human nature”. It means not taking a pill every day of your cycle in order to address the small fraction of days that you actually are fertile. It means choosing to abstain from intercourse on days that you know pregnancy would result, instead of using a condom on a fertile day, which, if the condom tore, would introduce the very possibility (nay, probability) you are intending to avoid. It also means knowing that using condoms on infertile days are pointless and detract from the experience of oneness that sex is naturally supposed to create. In sum, NFP is natural in that we get to truly learn what our bodies are capable of doing, and work with a normally functioning system.
Understand vs. Alter
So NFP isn’t always akin to breathing, and we also use artificial devices like eyeglasses and medication. We even may apply something artificially-made to family planning. But what is the function of that artificial device? Eyeglasses correct a vision problem. Medication treats a disease. But what disease, then, does “the pill” treat? What’s wrong with the woman’s body that “the pill” corrects? There comes the rub: our fertility is not a disease. Healthy fertility is a sign of a healthy hormonally balanced woman. The fundamental difference between NFP and contraception as they relate to things artificial, is that when we use a device like a thermometer for NFP, we use it to understand our body, not alter it. We use it to embrace the natural changes in our body, not suppress them. In turn we get to experience our bodies as they were intended to be, to treat them as the gifts that they are. We get to appreciate the various seasons of change, and invite our spouses into that same appreciation. And when things aren’t working quite the way they should, NFP gives us the tools to really get to the root of the problem, instead of throw a bandaid on it.
So sure, we can tout the “all naturalness” of NFP…the lack of side effects, the lack of artificial hormones, the absence of cancer risk. But beyond that we can also say that NFP is so much more natural than what is at the surface. The natural of NFP means that I understand my fertility. ·I accept it and work with it. It means that I can truly embrace my body as it was intended to be.
