By Lindsay Steele
The Catholic Messenger
Each year, the Catholic Church endeavors to share its beliefs about human sexuality, conjugal love and responsible parenthood through Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week.
The 2024 national education campaign will take place July 21-27. These dates highlight the anniversary of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (July 25), as well as the feast of Saints Joachim and Anne (July 26), the parents of the Blessed Mother and grandparents of Jesus. This year’s theme is “Love Beyond Measure: Supporting God’s Gift of Love and Life in Marriage.”
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) offers free NFP Awareness Week graphics and resources in English and Spanish on its website, https://tinyurl.com/USCCB-NFP. The diocesan Office of Faith Formation has a variety of NFP resources on its website, https://www.davenportdiocese.org/ff-media-nfp.
Natural Family Planning allows couples to choose between one of several methods of identifying times of fertility and infertility within a woman’s cycle. Couples can use this information to attempt to avoid or achieve pregnancy. Older, calendar-based methods of NFP gained a negative reputation for being unreliable, as they did not take into account the variances in a woman’s cycle. However, newer, symptom-based NFP methods demonstrate an accuracy of about 99% in indemnifying times of fertility and infertility, according to the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology.
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