Dr. Konald Prem, the physician so helpful to us in our founding and for many years, died January 25, 2015. Below is 1) a brief statement John sent for his obituary. This will be followed by 2) a brief comment from me and 3) John’s writing about his work with natural family planning in Battle-Scarred.
John’s brief statement:
Dr. Konald A. Prem, as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and serving a term as department head, was the highest ranking doctor in American (and perhaps the world) to be actively involved in the American natural family planning movement. He was the first American doctor to study breastfeeding and natural baby spacing among American mothers, finding that only 5% of his breastfeeding mothers became pregnant before their first period. That interest led him to use his expertise in the development of a natural family planning organization, the Couple to Couple League, in 1971. His work has been a service to married couples and to the Catholic Church and is now carried on by Natural Family Planning International headquartered in Steubenville, Ohio.
Sheila: Dr. Konald Prem’s research paper on breastfeeding infertility is available at our website at http://www.nfpandmore.org/Postpartum_ovulation_prem.pdf. He regretted that he did not seek publication of his paper when he completed it in the early Seventies. He also saw ovulation occurring when he was doing surgery but unfortunately did not have a camera recording this event. Dr. Prem had a strong interest in helping breastfeeding mothers with natural family planning. For example, a very active La Leche League leader had conceived once in the early postpartum months during amenorrhea, and she wanted to use natural family planning to avoid this happening again. With her next baby she became concerned as to whether she was fertile or not. He encouraged her to come in, checked internally, found long stretchy mucus which he showed her and said it would be wise to abstain at this time. Because of Dr. Prem’s work with breastfeeding mothers and our work to help breastfeeding mothers, we made a good team.
Excerpt from John’s memoirs, Battle-Scarred:
One of the first things we arranged was a meeting with Dr. Konald A. Prem with whom Sheila was scheduled to conduct a panel on breastfeeding and natural child spacing at the La Leche League’s convention in Chicago that summer. Sheila and he needed to clarify who was going to talk about what. Dr. Prem was, at the time, a full professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and he had researched breastfeeding infertility. (He never published his research, but it is now at www.nfpandmore.org.) He was a Catholic who accepted the teaching of Humanae Vitae, and he had years of experience with a temperature-based form of natural family planning (NFP). In 1968 he had published in Child and Family a detailed explanatory article on NFP, and it was one of our main sources of self-instruction on systematic natural family planning when we were in Canada.
After Dr. Prem and Sheila had completed their discussion about the breastfeeding panel, we asked him if he would be interested in helping us form an organization to teach NFP using trained user-couples as the teachers. He was aware of failed clinic and hospital programs, so he was immediately enthusiastic, saying that this concept was precisely what was needed for long-term teaching and support of user-couples. Both he and we were aware of the success of La Leche League and its use of volunteer breastfeeding mothers to spread the word and provide excellent support. What we proposed would follow the LLL model, and it proved to be an excellent working model.
La Leche League International held a huge conference in July 1971 at a hotel in downtown Chicago, and Sheila was privileged to be a panel presenter with Dr. Prem and Dr. Paul Busam of Cincinnati. As I write these pages, we are still in regular contact with Dr. Prem whom I last visited in the summer of 2009, and we have dinner with Dr. Busam once a month. Each
year I try to phone Dr. Prem with birthday greetings—easy to remember since we share the same birthday, just ten years apart.
The conference was successful on all counts. The adults were pleased with the presentation by Princess Grace of Monaco and by actress Susan St. James who was giving a new and popular face to breastfeeding, and our kids were thrilled when white-suited Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken stopped by our table to say “Hi” to them.
We started to teach natural family planning as part of the parish adult education program, and we can still remember the first class that fall. It was held in the parish library, and almost nobody was there at the appointed starting time. We decided to wait a bit, and within ten minutes there were about a dozen couples, more than enough so that we didn’t feel we were just talking to ourselves. Our teaching notes consisted of a few pages of handwriting. Our audio-visuals were just ourselves, although we may have had a chalkboard.
The course was simple but complete, consisting of four two-hour classes. Sheila would teach the aspects dealing with ecological breastfeeding, and I would deal with matters of faith and morals. Dr. Prem had already had a hard day of work and suffered from narcolepsy, so he snoozed in the back of the room as we talked, but when it was his turn to teach the Sympto-Thermal Method, he was refreshed and as sharp as ever. He came to each class of the two courses we taught, and for some time he continued to come to the classes taught by our new teachers in the Twin Cities.
Dr. Prem always stayed after class to help couples with the interpretation of their charts, but he did not use standardized Phase 3 rules as we do today. With his wide experience, he would simply tell the couples if they were now in pre-ovulation infertility, or the fertile time, or when Phase 3, the time of post-ovulation infertility, had begun. He would also tell them with great confidence that if he was wrong about a Phase 3 interpretation, he would deliver the baby free of charge. He also told them that no one had ever taken him up on that offer. We looked over his shoulder and not infrequently would ask him how he arrived at his interpretations. By listening to his explanations, we gradually developed the several rules that we still use today. The occasion of one of his interpretations still stays with me. At the end of the meeting, a couple who had been unable to get to the class on time dashed into the room. They wanted an interpretation, and when Dr. Prem told them they were in Phase 3, the wife raised the chart and cried out for all to hear, “Fun city tonight!” while her husband’s face turned beet-red.
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He is missed. May he rest in peace.
John and Sheila Kippley