CDO archdiocese launches two natural family planning books

The Cagayan de Oro (CDO) archdiocese in Mindanao has launched two books on natural family planning (NFP).

CDO Archbishop Antonio Ledesma said this is part of the Catholic church’s promotion of NFP as an alternative to the artificial contraceptive methods.

According to the Natural Family Planning International, Inc. (NFPI) website, “NFP is a way of following God’s plan for achieving and/or avoiding pregnancy.”

“It consists of ways to achieve or to avoid pregnancy using the physical means that God has built into human nature,” the NFPI added.

NFP has two distinct forms:
* Ecological breastfeeding (a form of child care that normally spaces babies about two years apart on the average), and

* Systematic NFP (a system that uses a woman’s signs of fertility to determine the fertile and infertile times of her cycle).

A married couple who wants to avoid pregnancy is encouraged to practice chaste abstinence during the fertile time of the woman’s cycle.

According to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) news site, one of the books, entitled “Natural Family Planning: Values, Issues and Practices,” is a compilation of articles about NFP.

“It gives the values formation of the Church and also simplified methods like the standard days method,” Ledesma said.

The second book is a trainers’ manual for “teaching NFP for potential trainers and counselor providers,” he added.

NFP coordinator Ana Leah Pealago said the books are products of the archdiocese’s three-year NFP program.

“We found that almost 3,000 couples are now users of NFP. There’s a growing number of people that are really interested in promoting this,” Pealago said.

She said the book is not meant for elementary and high school students because the main target of the program are married couples. –VVP, GMANews.TV