Natural Family Planning

Natural family planning, often shortened to NFP, is a family of methods built on observation.

1. 1The woman learns to notice specific signs that change through her cycle.
2. 2The couple records them.
3. 3Together they read the chart to tell the fertile days from the infertile ones.

What a couple does with that knowledge is their decision. The same observations serve a couple hoping to conceive and a couple with serious reasons to postpone a pregnancy.

“All natural” is the important part: these methods add no drugs, no devices, and no barriers. They ask instead for attention, record keeping, honest conversation, and periods of abstinence.

Fertility awareness rests on a few observable signs, and different methods use different combinations of them.

• Cervical mucus. Its amount, colour, and stretchiness change across the cycle, and the changes follow the approach of ovulation.
• Basal body temperature. The body’s resting temperature, taken on waking before activity, shifts slightly after ovulation has occurred.
• Hormone markers. Home monitors can detect hormone metabolites in urine that rise around ovulation.
• Cycle length. A record of past cycle lengths gives context, though on its own it says little about the cycle a woman is in now.

None of this involves drugs or devices that act on the body; the observing itself is what the method asks for. Cycles vary between women and within the same woman, especially after childbirth, while breastfeeding, and approaching menopause, which is exactly why training matters.

A decision about family planning is a health decision as well as a moral one, so it should involve a qualified health professional who knows your history. This is educational content, not medical advice.

These methods are genuinely different from one another in what they observe, how they are charted, and how they are taught. They are not interchangeable: several are developed and taught by their own organizations, and all of the methods below are taught by the RP-NFP program of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro.

• Basal Body Temperature (BBT) Method. The woman records her waking temperature every morning before getting up. A sustained rise of roughly 0.2 to 0.5 °C, held for three days, indicates that ovulation has passed and that the post-ovulatory infertile time has begun. On its own it identifies only the post-ovulatory phase, so it is commonly combined with other signs.
• Billings Ovulation Method, taught by the World Organisation Ovulation Method Billings (WOOMB). It relies on the woman’s own observation of cervical mucus, interpreted with the method’s rules.
• Sympto-Thermal Method, taught by organizations such as the Couple to Couple League and SymptoPro. It combines mucus observations with basal body temperature so that two signs cross-check each other.
• Standard Days Method (SDM) with mucus observation. The Standard Days Method is calendar based, used with CycleBeads, and was developed by the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University. It is intended only for women whose cycles are 26 to 32 days long, and it treats days 8 through 19 as fertile. In this program SDM is taught together with daily cervical-mucus observation, so that what the woman observes cross-checks the calendar; that pairing is how this program teaches the method, not part of the Institute’s own protocol.
• Two-Day Method, also developed at the Institute for Reproductive Health. It asks a simple daily question about whether secretions were noticed today or yesterday.
• Lactational Amenorrhea Method (LAM) with breastfeeding and mucus interface. LAM relies on the delay in the return of fertility during breastfeeding, and it applies only while all of its conditions hold: the baby is under six months old, the mother’s periods have not returned, and the baby is fully or nearly fully breastfed, day and night. Alongside LAM the program teaches breastfeeding guidance, and how to move on to cervical-mucus observation once any one of those conditions no longer holds.

The Responsible Parenthood and Natural Family Planning (RP-NFP) program of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro, Misamis Oriental, teaches all of the methods listed above:

The program provides assessment, and it trains new coordinators, who in turn teach RP-NFP to acceptors such as married couples.

The main coordinator and instructor is Susan S. Pahente, under the CFLA ministry of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro. This website is the RP-NFP program’s own site; it is not the official website of CFLA or of the Archdiocese. Enquiries are welcome through the contact page.

The RP-NFP program is sponsored and approved by the Department of Health (DOH).

Two things consistently make the difference: being taught properly by someone trained in that method, and charting honestly every day instead of guessing when life gets busy. Because these methods use no drugs, devices, or barriers, there is nothing to fall back on when the observations are skipped.

This is educational content, not medical advice.

The Church accepts the use of the infertile periods of the cycle by spouses who have just reasons to space births, and Humanae Vitae 16 speaks of this recourse to the infertile periods as morally legitimate. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2370 paraphrases the same distinction: periodic continence respects the bodies of the spouses and the openness of the marital act to life, while contraception does not.

The method is therefore not the point of the teaching; the meaning of the marital act is. Read Catholic Teaching for the documents themselves, and Responsible Parenthood for the decision NFP serves.

Coordinators trained by the RP-NFP program serve in almost all parishes of Misamis Oriental. To learn RP-NFP, or to ask about training as a coordinator, use the contact page and say which parish you belong to.

In the meantime, see the upcoming events for sessions you can attend, or send a message and say where you are based.

Documents and organizations referenced on this page:

• Humanae Vitae (Paul VI, 1968) — paragraph 16 on recourse to the infertile periods.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church — paragraphs 2366–2372 on the transmission of life and the regulation of births, including 2370.
• Method organizations named above: WOOMB (Billings Ovulation Method), the Couple to Couple League and SymptoPro (sympto-thermal), and the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University (Standard Days Method and Two-Day Method).

The Resources page collects further reading, and you can always ask the program a question.