By Therese Bermpohl, Director of the Office for Family Life
Eight doctors, six of them from Virginia, take issue with an article entitled “Contraceptive Choices in Women with Chronic Disease” that appeared in the Sept 15, 2010, edition of American Family Physician because it fails to acknowledge the scientific advances that have been made with regard to natural methods of family planning. As they put it “not one of the options reviewed by the authors reference any currently available and scientifically validated non-contraceptive natural family planning method, all of which are 100% medically free of side effects.”
Because their letter was not printed in American Family Physician, I post it here in hopes it will encourage women looking for a natural, drug-free alternative, but who may not know they exist:
“In Contraceptive Choices in Women with Underlying Medical Conditions (American Family Physician, Sept. 15, 2010, a journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians), Bonnema et al. discuss what contraceptive options family physicians can recommend to women with specific chronic medical conditions. The emphasis in the article is on how physicians can select a contraceptive method that represents a lower medical risk profile for women diagnosed with diabetes, hypertension or lupus, are obese or women who engage in habits like smoking. Unfortunately, not one of the options reviewed by the authors reference any currently available and scientifically validated non-contraceptive natural family planning method, all of which are 100% medically free of side effects.
It is highly probable that the authors of the above article are not dissimilar from most physicians, including Obstetricians and Gynecologists. They likely are unfamiliar with the utility and wide applicability of natural methods of fertility regulation for purposes of avoiding pregnancy, which was established by the multi-center trial of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1980’s. WHO defined the umbrella term, natural family planning (NFP), as “methods for planning and preventing pregnancy by observation of the naturally occurring signs and symptoms of the fertile and infertile phases of the menstrual cycle, with the avoidance of intercourse during the fertile phase if pregnancy is to be avoided.”
Fortunately, natural methods of fertility regulation are currently being provided both nationally and internationally in a variety of ambulatory care settings. In the United States, the major methods in use include the Billings Ovulation Method, Creighton Model FertilityCare System, the Sympto-thermal Methods and the Marquette Method. Modern natural methods are not to be confused with calendar rhythm and are not dependent on the regularity of the woman’s cycle.
In addition, the authors of the above article made no reference to population-based surveys that have demonstrated a significant interest in NFP—about 25% of women are interested in NFP to avoid pregnancy, 33% are interested in NFP to conceive, and about 40% of men are interested as well. This interest is not associated with religion, education, age, or income (Journal of Family Practice 1998; 46: 65-71).
Natural methods have been evaluated in the medical literature (Journal of Reproductive Medicine, 1998, British Medical Journal, 1993, etc.) for their use-effectiveness to avoid pregnancy and have been found to be highly reliable. Effectiveness data was presented to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services when the International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) was updated to include Counseling and instruction in natural family planning to avoid pregnancy (V25.04) and Procreative counseling and advice using natural family planning (V26.41). An overview presentation “Natural Methods of Family Planning” may be viewed at www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd9/att4_NFP_mar06.pdf
In the United States and increasingly in other countries including Ireland, England and Poland, increasing numbers of family physicians and obstetrician-gynecologists recognize that many hormone-based contraceptive pharmaceuticals and devices such as IUDs have mechanisms of action that have the potential to interrupt a pregnancy in embryonic development (see Postfertilization Effects of Oral Contraceptives and Their Relationship to Informed Consent, http://archfami.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/9/2/126).
Physicians trained in natural methods of fertility regulation and in the emerging field of NaProTechnology, frequently observe that women are seeking to enhance their fertility, particularly those who have experienced one or more spontaneous miscarriages or have never been able to achieve a pregnancy. By actively tracking their cycles, natural methods of fertility regulation empower women to be able to recognize gynecologic abnormalities sooner and come to appreciate their fertility as a sign of health, not of a disease.
In order for women in general and women with chronic medical conditions in particular to make an informed decision regarding family planning methods, physicians are ethically bound to provide their female patients with the option of learning effective methods of natural fertility regulation—methods which are free of all medical side effects.
We invite all physicians to develop confidence and competence in recommending a non-contraceptive, natural family planning system by attending an annual meeting of the American Academy of FertilityCare Professionals (see www.aafcp.org) or to contact a local natural family planning center (see www.fertilitycare.org; www.ccli.org; www.Boma-usa.org; www.nfp.marquette.edu).”
Robert F. Conkling, MD, FCP - Family Medicine and FertilityCare practitioner
P.O Box 7221, Woodbridge, VA
tel: 202-320-8834 email: quovadis.lifecoach@gmail.com
Leslie Chorun, MD, CFCMC, FCP
FertilityCare Medical Consultant and Practitioner
4148 Booth Place #7 Kansas City, Kansas
email: st.lydwina@gmail.com
Karen D. Poehalios, MD, Family Medicine
125 River Bend Dr. Suite 3, Charlottesville, VA
tel: 434-984-4200 email: firstmedfp@yahoo.com
John T. Bruchalski, MD Obstertrics and Gynecology
Tepeyac Family Center 11135 Lee Highway, Fairfax, VA
tel: 703-273-9440 email: jtb@tepeyacfamilycenter.com
Frank Dennehy, MD Family Practice
140 West 11th Street Front Royal, VA
email: fdennehy@valleyhealthlink.com
Theodore F. O’Donnell, MD, CFCMC, Family Practice
100 Highline Drive, East Wenatchee, WA
tel: 509-884-0614 email: todonnell@wvmedical.com
Lorna CVetkovich, MD FACOG (Obstetrics and Gynecology)
Tepeyac Family Center, 11135 Lee Highway, Fairfax, VA
email: lcvetkovich@pol.net
Vivian Lugo-Eschenwald MD, DABFP, Family Medicine Ass. of Alexandria
2000 N. Beauregard Street, Alexandria, VA
tel: 703-370-2400 email: vlugomd@gmail.com
As a woman whose life and health have been completely turned around thanks to the Creighton Model FertilityCare System I can only recommend NFP to all women and couples. Thank you to the office of Family Life for publishing this letter.
We used NFP for 25 years from the time I was 24 years old until I went into menopause at age 46. We had 3 children and then waited 13 years while my husband did his graduate degree, and then we conceived our fourth who just went to college this year. NFP is not only a wonderful method of birth control but helps diagnose women’s health problems. The only trouble is that it is free! So no one knows about it!!!!
[...] Letter to the editor penned by prominent physicians falls on deaf ears As they put it “not one of the options reviewed by the authors reference any currently available and scientifically validated non-contraceptive natural family planning method, all of which are 100% medically free of side effects.” [...]
My fiance and I only intend to use NFP when we get married. He is in graduate school studying genetics. I am hopefully starting a PhD program in the fall to study neuroscience. He and I have read about how NFP works and it just makes sense. I wish more people would realize this! It’s simple data collection and interpretation. Anyone that has even taken a high school science class in their lives can do it.
The side effects of contraception are serious. My fiance told me that he had never really had an opinion on the whole matter until he started to realize what they really did and the side effects that can happen. He said he couldn’t handle the idea that his wife might have a blood clot because of a medication that isn’t actually medically necessary.
Thank you for your excellent letter! I am a Creighton model teacher and consultant and can’t agree more.
I concur. I learned the Creighton Model via the NFP Medical Consultant course in 1991-1992. I have helped many couples conceive, and have prevented more than a few miscarriages. People are slow to believe something so risk-free and relatively easy can be so effective. It has certainly improved my marriage, and my practice of the faith as well!. Shame on AFP for not at the very least printing the letter.
My life was also completely changed by Creighton Model FertilityCare System.
I struggled with chronic migraines for years. Doctor after doctor recommended “the pill” and antidepressants along with a slew of other medications that left me feeling fatigued and numb.
The unbelievable part was that my neurologist believed my headaches were hormonal, but offered no treatment options other than medications. My OB/GYN office also knew my progesterone levels were low, but stated there was no medical reason to treat a cycling woman with progesterone. When I asked them where I should go, they told me they didn’t know.
Creighton was the answer. A gift from God. Finally real women’s health solutions!
Thanks to Creighton I have been headache free for almost 2 years and have been able to address issues with my cycle I didn’t even know existed. Now, instead of trying to suppress my fertility, I feel empowered by it.
Our modern civilization has many dark movements. So-called Gay and Lesbian marriages, and unions, the scourge of abortion that has directly claimed perhaps 700 million lives since our Lady of Fatima first appeared during the second decade of the 20th Century, the ubiquitous use of artificial contraception, the frequency of cohabitive living arrangements, the scourge of the illegal drug trade and illegal drug usage, euthanasia, assisted suicide, internet pornography, and the many other behaviors that offend Our Lady and Our Lord, will require we as individuals and collectively to give an account of.
Radical Islam of the forms that encourage suicide bombings, IED explosions even near at Mosques, and the like is a growing menace that we conservatives in the West cannot ignore.
The best way to confront radical Islam, at least as far as civilians like myself and others who are not engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, is to assert the fundamental dignity, and sacredness of all human persons from the very moment of conception onward.
I will even go as far as to say we must assert the fundamental dignity and sacredness of all human persons on a provisional basis and who may not even get the chance to be created because of the use of artificial contraception. And yes, the Vatican has not relaxed Church requirements that all married Catholic couples abstain from its usage.
We live in an age where we are able to explore, ponder, and delight in the wonders of creation to an ever greater extent as a result of our ability to explore space, build enormously powerful telescopes, and to probe the heart of matters and energies to ever greater depths with ever more powerful high energy physics experimental apparatus. We are learning more and more about the workings of the human brain as well as those of animals. Developments in statistical psychology and sociology are coming in as fast as surveys can be conducted and the data analyzed.
But yet, as a physicist, I can assure you that the tendency among my colleagues is to feel that the more we learn, the more questions we have and the more we see how little we know. With each new generation of particle accelerators and each order or two magnitude increase in particle collision energies, new phenomenon are discovered, some of them totally unexpected and not fitting within contemporary paradigms. Reports of the empirical results already being obtained from the Large Hadron Collider and recent results from the Tevatron within the U.S. are bearing this reality out once again.
Some of my fellow Catholics focus solely on GOD to the extent that they no longer love their neighbor as themselves, and much less their enemies. We are required by GOD to love all human persons. If you do not believe me, then refer to Sacred Scripture for the proof.
The requirement to love our enemies and our neighbors is not somehow less important than the love of GOD, but is absolutely essential for the love of GOD, and complementary for the love of GOD.
No, I am not an idolater nor am I a pantheist. However, from informed reason alone, I can guarantee you that creation is the sole product of GOD’s work outside of HIMSELF. This is evident from the fact that everything not GOD was created by GOD and is therefore a creature. Everything outside of GOD in the ontological sense is creation and was created by HIM.
Should we love and respect our fellow creatures, especially persons be they of the form of us humans, angels, disembodied human souls, and any extraterrestrial and ultraterrestrial bodily persons if such exist? We most certainly should and we must because of the solidary that exists among all created persons.
I will go one step further and state that it can be binding under the penalty of serious sin, even mortal sin, to foster a hatred toward condemned rational creatures such as the souls in Hell and the fallen angels because even though the latter fallen creatures perform moral wrong-doing in a definitively chosen manner, they are nonetheless ontologically good, perhaps to degrees we cannot comprehend.
Recognizing the difference between morally evil choices and sin and the sinner is part of what it means to be a spiritually mature Christian. Theological intellectual maturity recognizes the difference between ontological goodness and morally good or evil acts or morally guided behavior.
Yes, all rational creatures share an ontological solidarity even if they by free choice or by non-deliberate scandal cannot recognize this fact. GOD willed the interdependence of all creatures, and so I would advise some of my fellow conservatives that we are our brother’s keeper, and even the least living human persons among us count and are worthy of our support.
We will not see an end to abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and terrorist attacks until we realize this fact.
Now do not get me wrong. I am not against the military’s efforts to legitimately defend our nation, and am all in favor of a strong defense, so much so that I have even contemplated seeking some form of employment in our nation’s nuclear weapons research and development industry at times. However, with our great strength must come great compassion, and we should never hate fellow rational creatures, most of all never hate our fellow human beings.
Part of what it means to have strength in a constructive and noble manner is to nurture and protect the poor, weak, rejected, and vulnerable among us.
Our countries great military strength does not imply a moral high ground. Even Satan himself has great natural strength and fantastic intelligence, in fact more so than any other creature in all probability, but yet he makes the most evil of choices. If you do not believe me, consider the havoc he has wreaked on creation and in our civilization.
And no, I am not a devil worshiper, and I do in fact believe it is wise to rebuke Satan and his attacks and those of the other fallen angels as an enemy of GOD and to pray for deliverance from them.
We need to see the whole of creation as the complement of GOD, which while nowhere near equal to GOD, is nonetheless so loved by GOD that HE bothered to create it in the first place.
During these last few days before Christmas, when we feel the desire to slight a poor homeless man begging for money, to mock an immature youth for cranking his car stereo for attention, to stare mockingly at a morbidly obese person for not living up to modern ideals of the cult of the body, and anyone else who we may feel irked by or be revulsed by due to their seemingly lack of psychological and/or physical prowess, it would be wise to forsake the insults, and innuendos, and say a prayer for these persons.
After all, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other radical Islamic organizations are actively seeking to recruit such disaffected and marginalized persons and are having success in their efforts to do so.
Now absolutely, I do not endorse radical Islam as I am a conservative Catholic who believes in following to the letter, the Church teaching in its Supreme and Ordinary Magisterium, Authentic Traditional Church Teaching, and Sacred Scripture interpreted under the approval and wisdom of the Church. I am also a member of the Knights of Columbus and I deeply respect and enjoy the Camaraderie among my fellow Knights. However, I am mindful of the innumerable modern day examples of the Samaritan women weeping at Jesus feet, and the adulteress about to be stoned who was lovingly saved and forgiven by our Lord.
Yes, many of the first will be last, and the last will be first. Saint Mary Magdalene is already a fine example, and rest assure, many more will follow.
GOD BLESS!
Jim
[...] Many in the medical profession ignore the benefits of Natural Family Planning. Physicians write a letter defending the merits of NFP stating that it is 100% free of side-effects: Letter to the editor penned by prominent physicians falls on deaf ears [...]