It's Time to Change Your Mind About NFP

“To control something isn’t to care for it.”

Whew, I wish someone had opened me up to that truth when I was 18. When I was told by seemingly every woman and every doctor that it was more dangerous to learn my body’s cycle than it was to take synthetic hormones for years on end.

I was fed the idea—and in turn, strongly believed—that “knowing your body” was the basic equivalent of being pregnant. That the minute I turned away from birth control, I was stepping into motherhood. There was no middle ground. There was no freedom. It was pills (or a foreign object in your body) or pregnancy. And you took your pick. 

And I lived in that terrible, heavy, lonely dichotomy for years. 

And perhaps you’re expecting to hear that my conversion to Catholicism changed that all right away.

But I’m here, to be honest, and say it didn’t. I went through my marriage prep NFP (natural family planning) class thinking it was all a joke. The credibility wasn’t there for me, and the teachers were parents. Why would I leave the pills behind on the promise I wouldn’t immediately become pregnant from people who clearly couldn’t avoid pregnancy themselves? I took them as proof it didn’t work, that a middle ground didn’t exist, and that I was right. 

My conversion away from using birth control and the secular beliefs about sex and the body that I grasped so tightly, the ultimate about-face, was actually a result of reading TOB (Theology of the Body) by Pope John Paul II. Something that was never mentioned in my NFP class, and a document that should be in my humble opinion everywhere and anywhere for all to read, and re-read and then read again. 

But first let me give you the whole quote from the beginning:

“To control something isn’t to care for it. Control is about power. It’s about managing a problem. Caring, on the other hand, is about love. It seeks to honor a good. Someone who seeks to control their body and someone who seeks to care for their body is doing two entirely different things. One is treating the body as a problem; the other is treating the body as a gift. One sees the body as a thing; the other sees the body as the person.”

~Emily Stimpson Chapman, “The Catholic Table”

I spent years seeking to control my body under the falsehood that I was actually caring for it.

And that’s why it never, really, felt like care. Because it wasn’t. 

What Pope John Paul II so wonderfully explains, and what Emily hits home in her quote, is something I think a lot of us are more desperate to hear than we think. Being told to pick pills or pregnancy, and oftentimes at a very young age, is exhausting and a pretty dim outlook on who you are in relation to your body and in relation to the body(ies) of the opposite gender: have sex, but make sure you keep yourself away from any consequences of it; the desire to have children one day, but keep your body from being habitable; seek sexual freedom, but always have contraception on you or within a quick purchase; commit yourself fully to another person, but keep the ultimate and unhindered giving of yourself to another out of the equation. 

It’s a message that doesn’t line up with itself, not fully. Not when you look at it a little closer or try to live it out. It forces the woman to be at war with her natural rhythms, it expects us to have no emotional tie with sex when it is always deeply emotional, and chains us down in the name of “freedom.” 

JPII opened my eyes. I remember distinctly the scales falling. And I understood that NFP is, yes, presented as a way to avoid or achieve pregnancy without harming your body or breaking core tenants of sacramental marriage. It is a door into multiple methods you can choose to track your body through its cycles so that it is no longer a big mystery to you.

But it is first and foremost the way to live the way that God intended us to live. 

JPII writes about many topics within his document, and I would encourage you to read them all, but what hit home for me was the freedom that lies within treating our bodies as they were meant to be treated, whether you are single or married. Of the dignity that was given to each and every one of us, and how that understanding of the Theology of the Body made Natural Family Planning finally make sense. It finally gave NFP the credibility and purpose that I saw missing. 

Under TOB, you don’t have to choose pills or pregnancy. There is a huge space between those two, rid of current cultural (mis)understandings of what fertility is, what sex is, and what sexual freedom is. And learning about it was like a breath of fresh air. 

John Paul II points out that “the Church teaches as she does because of her concern for the true good of man. Too often we tend to think that she only wants to control us, while in reality, she desires true freedom for all of her children. Man can only truly be free while living in accord with his dignity as a human person.” 

And I was so tired of seeking control in the name of care. Society today will tell you your fertility is a problem, that you need to have control in order to care for yourself properly… When in reality it is a deep gift—which we are not all given in equal portion—and which deserves to be treated in light of the truth that it is.

NFP spells out the scientific map of navigating that gift.

TOB expresses the origin behind the gift in more than one way, revealing it is not only from God to us as men and women separately, but from God to us, as men and women together. Personally, TOB allowed me to take NFP seriously. It allowed me to have a Saint Paul-like conversion, where I went from preaching about birth control to preaching even more earnestly and passionately about theology of the body. 

And that is my invitation to you: if you haven’t interacted with NFP or have and reject it in some way, read John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Learn about the why’s and how’s behind a Church practice that is heavily critiqued against our current societal norms, not only because it will set a lot of lies straight in ways your heart desires, but because it will open you up to freedom your soul deserves to take part in.