Natural Family Planning: Nature's Way - God's Way

7. A Quarter-Century of NFP Experience

My first paper on NFP appeared in 1956.(1) It dealt with 156 couples using a simple rhythm system with a fairly satisfactory success rate approximately five pregnancies per 100 woman-years. The method failure rate of those who kept strictly to the method was only three.

Since then I have instructed thousands of couples in modern variations of NFP. In my latest report,(2) 600 successive cases were analyzed. Over the years I have seen great personal, marital and spiritual benefits flowing from the use of NFP. At the same time society has gradually become aware of the hazards and disadvantages inherent in conventional contraception. These I have outlined in a recent pamphlet.(3)

At first sight it may seem strange that the medical profession in general has not espoused NFP, since one of its basic duties in the field of promoting good health should be to teach the principles of physiological living. NFP is the perfect physiological way of life in the area of sexuality for those who wish to avoid pregnancy either temporarily or permanently. But to achieve these ends the profession tends to adopt means that are surgical (intrauterine devices) or pharmacological (the pill), and its mind seems closed against the efficacy of modern NFP.

NFP is incompatible with artificial contraception, sterilization and abortion. To abandon all these may be too high a price for the secular humanist physician to pay. Sexual freedom has been bought at a tremendous cost: the destruction of individual lives (in abortion), of personal sanctity, of innumerable marriages, even of society itself.

Here are advantages peculiar to NFP and to no other method of regulating conception:

• 1. It preserves normal intercourse.
• 2. It is esthetically and ethically acceptable to all peoples and to all cultures.
• 3. No drugs; no inherent dangers to health.
• 4. No cost; no equipment.
• 5. Responsibility for family planning is shared equally by both partners. In every other method the onus is placed on one partner, usually the wife. NFP embodies the ideal of equality of the two sexes.
• 6. The marriage is strengthened by the necessary self-control. Other contraceptives eliminate the need for sexual discipline; this makes the marriages vulnerable in times of stress.
• 7. NFP is not detrimental to the unmarried because it is not an inducement to promiscuity.
• 8. There is an inexorable progression from contraception to sterilization and abortion. NFP users are not subject to this rule.

References:

(1) Dunn, H.P. "The Safe Period", Lancet (1956), 2, 441-442.

(2) Dunn, H.P. "Natural Family Planning", N.Z.Med.J. (1975), 82, 407-408.

(3) Dunn, H.P. "What's Wrong With Contraception" (1979), The Word Publishers, Box 66-018, Auckland, N.Z., pp. 20, 75c.

by H.P. Dunn, M.D.
National Women's Hospital, Auckland, New Zealand

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