Natural Family Planning Awareness Week starts on Sunday. The Adult and Family Ministry Director at our parish has humored me and is co-coordinating, “Catholic Women Go Green- A Women’s Health and Fertility Forum.” I’m excited where this has taken us! It’s next Saturday, July 25, from 9-11:30 a.m. at the Pastoral Center in Austin. Here’s more information: womenforumflyer
The concept for the forum came from wanting to attract women to “natural” means of addressing health issues–especially their procreative health. Organic has become an ironic trend. Women are willing to pay more money for organic and ‘natural’ foods BUT are still loading their bodies with artificial contraceptives for regulating their fertility and addressing gynecological problems. In addition there are so many misconceptions about natural family planning and its effectiveness. The Pope Paul VI Institute has made many advances in treating common hormonal problems and has success rates for infertile couples that are upto 4 times greater than invitro fertilization at a fraction of the cost.
This of course is not at all to downplay the role of the Church’s teaching in using NFP as a natural means of spacing children. But since we actually want people to go to this–both NFP users and non-NFP users–we wanted to give a different spin to inform people about the many blessings of NFP. The reality is that most couples won’t go to a forum/talk that explicity has “NFP” in the title. I tried one of those a few years ago and there was almost no one there. Last year the diocese’s NFP coordinator pulled together a seminar on infertility at my suggestion–again to give a different spin to the NFP discussion. We had a great turnout.
So if you’re a women, come!! Invite a friend! Download and email the flier to anyone you think would be interested. Hope to see you there!
