The Triple Strand During the Early Years
When we began to teach NFP in the late Sixties, we wanted to teach couples how they could enjoy a natural spacing of babies through ecological breastfeeding. We had done the research, and would publish it in early 1972. We knew that mothers who breastfed according to what we now call the Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding would experience, on the average, 14 to 15 months of breastfeeding amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation due to breastfeeding). In 1971 this knowledge was even rarer than it is today. Every couple deserves to know this information about the way God has made woman.
We wanted to teach couples how to practice a form of systematic NFP—the Sympto-Thermal Method—as taught by Dr. Konald A. Prem and others. This was intended to help couples who truly had sufficiently serious reasons to postpone their next pregnancy or to limit the expansion of their families. Every couple deserves to know this information about how God has made woman with identifiable fertile and infertile times of her menstrual cycle.
We wanted to support the teaching of Humanae Vitae, and we wanted to do so in a way that is simple and easy to grasp. That’s why we incorporated into our NFP course from the very beginning the easy-to-understand covenant theology of sexuality. Its primary statement consists of 17 words: “Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.” I had first stated that in my 1967 article, “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital,” and we knew from experience that it helps people to understand why Pope Paul VI taught that marital contraception is “intrinsically dishonest” (HV 14). It was and remains today a basic and simple “theology of the body.” Everybody deserves to know this basic information about God’s plan for love, marriage, and sexuality.
These three subjects—ecological breastfeeding as a form of NFP, the Sympto-Thermal Method as the most complete form of systematic NFP, and the covenant theology to support Humanae Vitae—constituted the Triple Strand Approach to natural family planning. These are the principle charisms we brought to the natural family planning movement.
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach