Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a term that refers to different methods intended to achieve or postpone pregnancy. These natural and ethical methods are supported by science and consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Married couples should welcome children because God intentionally designed humans to reproduce. The universal and eternal truths of God’s plan are that married love and sexuality should be self-giving instead of selfish.
Against the contraceptive culture that influences the secular world, the Church teaches that pregnancy should be avoided only when there is good reason and after careful discernment through prayer and proper understanding of what the Church teaches.
The Catholic Church celebrates NFP Awareness Week to coincide with the July 25 anniversary of the Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on human life.
Love and life should never be separated:
Respecting human fertility and dignity of the person:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth.”
Genesis 1: 27-28
Trusting God with your fertility:
The depth and the beauty of the Church’s teaching:
Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, “every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” is intrinsically evil.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2370
Allowing God to be Lord of the most intimate part of life:
Understanding how God has designed fertility:
Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the later they obstruct the natural development of the generative process.
Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968
NFP is not the same as contraception:
Widespread use of artificial contraception has led to problems :
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
Exposed to the beauty of the faith:
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