Natural Family Planning International

The Catholic Church is the only real hope of this country.  The Protestant churches have all caved on the matter of birth control, most of the them have caved on abortion, and I’m not sure how many will stand firm against sodomy as marriage.  Logically, the acceptance of contraception entails the acceptance of sodomy, as was predicted and then fulfilled in the Church of England.

The importance of the Catholic Church is what makes our work so frustrating.

Also frustrating is the fact that the US  Bishops started the Human Life Foundation in 1968 which then succeeded in getting the NIH to run a comparative study of the Ovulation Method (OM) and the Sympto-Thermal Method  (STM) in 1976-1978.  What they found was that the STM was so superior to the OM that they discontinued the study early.  The professional ethics of the investigators would not allow them to put people into the OM side after they were certain that the STM was superior.  As the study reported, “It is of interest that after couples were informed in August, 1978, that a statistically significant trend in the pregnancy rates between the OM and STM groups had been found, almost all of the STM volunteers continued in training and virtually all of the OM volunteers requested to be, and were, thoroughly trained in STM.”

Drs. John Billings and Thomas Hilgers raised objections, apparently forgetting that any faults of the study applied to both sides, and their comments had no effect on the final report in 1981.  So after the bishops got this study, the various diocesan offices seem to ignore it.  It seems to me that dioceses do more promotion of the OM than any other program.  The user effectiveness of the OM in that study was just under 61%.  The Joanne Doud study of the Creighton Model reported a user effectiveness of 96% but when standard statistics were applied (counting the pregnancies that the couples themselves said were unplanned), the rate was 67%.  Yet dioceses seem to think that this is the way to go.

I have to wonder if one reason for the failure of the Church to persuade great numbers of couples to use only natural methods might be that the imperfect-use rates of the most touted systems are in the same ballpark as the Calendar Rhythm that they sometimes compare and criticize.

I am convinced that the bishops need to adopt a core curriculum for NFP that will give couples sufficient information so that they will be able to make informed choices about which signs they want to use or not use.  What we have had for the last 45 years has not been working.  I think it’s time to have both a mandated course and that such a course be sufficiently complete.

John Kippley
www.johnkippley.com

The last NFP conference I attended (2010) lasted several days.  My one disappointment, even surprise, was that none of the speakers mentioned the cervix sign, even when discussing the use of NFP during difficult times. Nor was the internal mucus exam mentioned.  See last week’s blog on the internal mucus sign.

As I mentioned last week, Dr. Edward Keefe at first taught the mucus sign at the vulva “but it was insufficient, inconstant, and lagged behind the true state of the ovaries according to my patients.  Most of them had been ‘rhythm-failures’ many times over and they demanded perfect results.”  So he began having his patients obtain the mucus with their fingers at the source, the cervix.  Soon his patients were describing changes in the cervix which they observed while doing the internal mucus exam.  That is, the women noticed that the cervix was higher and more open and softer when the mucus was most abundant and stretchy.

Dr. Keefe studied their observations for more than 10 years.  The women could not understand why the cervix sign was not given more publicity.  I feel the same way.  Why is the cervix sign ignored by many experts in the field of natural family planning?  The internal mucus exam, discussed in the previous blog, is likewise ignored by many in the NFP field.

John visited Dr. Edward Keefe twice at his home after the doctor retired, the last time just a few months before he died.  We are grateful for his work and interest in helping couples determine their fertile and infertile times.  In addition to his practical research on the cervix and the internal mucus exam, he developed the Ovulindex thermometer which was used by many couples practicing NFP.  It is no longer available, but I’m sure there are a few of us who still have one stored somewhere even though we no longer need it.  (Quotation from Coverline: “Recollections on Mucus Alone as a Fertility Sign” by Edward F. Keefe, M.D., Spring, 1975)

Both the internal mucus sign and the cervix sign are taught in the NFP International manual highlighted below.

Sheila Kippley
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach

Dr. Edward F. Keefe, who practiced oblstetrics and gynecology in New York City, was interested in improving “systematic abstinence as a means of family limitation.”  He was excited when he read a paper by A. F. Clift in 1945 “on the rheology of human cervical mucus.”  Rheology is the study of fluids and something women judge everyday when working with syrups, jellies and batters, etc.  This paper made him wonder if women could judge the fertile time by the mucus as was demonstrated in farm animals.

He gave a medical report to a hospital staff in 1950.  The staff listened politely but many doubted there was a fertile time in women at all!  He soon became convinced of the changes in the mucus sign as an important sign of fertility.  Thus he incorporated this sign in his thermometer instructions.  At first he taught observation of the mucus at the vulva, but his patients found this observation “insufficient” and “inconstant.”  He felt the “best mucus sample was needed and the place to find it was in the cervical canal, unaffected by passage through the vagina.”  He began to teach his patients the internal mucus exam—–getting the mucus at its source, the cervix.  He tried aspiration of the mucus through a tube but found the best exam was achieved with the use of the fingers.

Dr. Keefe was disappointed when Dr. Billings promoted only the mucus sign at the vulva and dropped the teaching of the temperature sign.  In Dr. Keefe’s words regarding Dr. Billings’ new book, “I would rather that mucus signs supplement the charting of temperatures, not replace them, as the book demands.  Moreover, just because mucus on the vulva is not a dependable sign, its shortcomings must not cause us to undervalue the changes in the cervical mucus and the cervix itself.”  Cervical mucus was meant to mean that mucus obtained at the cervix. (Quotations from Coverline: “Recollections on Mucus Alone as a Fertility Sign” by Edward F. Keefe, M.D., Spring, 1975. His work was first published in 1962, Bulletin of Sloane Hospital for Women, 8, 129.)

Next blog:  How Dr. Keefe learned the cervix sign from his patients!

Sheila Kippley
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach