Appreciation of Ecological Breastfeeding

January 16th, 2011

John and I continue to believe that eco-breastfeeding should be taught as an option to every engaged and married couple.  One mother wrote us recently showing her appreciation for having been taught eco-breastfeeding.

“Continue your good work and don’t grow weary.  Our prayers are coming your way.  Please don’t ever forget what good scientific information you have given to the masses.  The “work” that you and your husband have given people is not [just] a helpful aid to fertility monitoring, but instead, it is a way of living, a way of embracing marriage selflessly, a way of nurturing our children, and a way of growing a family in the love of Christ.  As I breastfeed my fourth child, I thank you for helping me to be the mother I am proud to be.  I will never regret mothering using ecological breastfeeding.  It is so funny to even give “it” (ecological breastfeeding) a name because it just seems so natural to do—like I was always meant to mother this way. Praise be to the Kippleys for using the talents God has given them to nourish the Body of Christ.”

Sheila Kippley
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding: The Frequency Factor
Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood

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Mother Teresa and Natural Family Planning

January 9th, 2011

One time during a conference John and Fr. John Hardon were discussing natural family planning.  John wondered what kind of natural family planning Mother Teresa taught to the poor.  Fr. Hardon said, “Let’s call her up.”  Father called Mother Teresa immediately and John had the privilege of talking to her over the phone.  She said some of her nuns teach temperature-only and some nuns teach mucus-only.

In her lecture when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she said this about natural family planning where only the temperature sign was mentioned:
“We are doing another thing which is very beautiful—we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.  And in Calcutta alone in six years—it is all in Calcutta—we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practice this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other. We teach them the temperature meter which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand.”

And again in this talk, Mother says:  “The poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things. The other day one of them came to thank and said: You people who have vowed chastity—you are the best people to teach us family planning. Because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other.”

Sheila Kippley
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach

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The Triple Strand of NFP

January 2nd, 2011

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

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