Natural Family Planning provides options for Catholic couples

IC photo/Linda Petersen

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Shown at the July 1 Natural Family Planning event are, from left, Crystal Painter, director of the Diocese of Salt Lake City Office of Family Life; intern Denise Winters; Margaret Howard; Dr. Joseph Stanford; Samantha Mikkelson, an intern joining the class from Minnesota; and intern Andrea Dovel.

SALT LAKE CITY — Couples in the Diocese of Salt Lake City looking to find out more about Natural Family Planning now have more resources in the form of Andrea Dovel and Denise Winters, who recently completed the second phase of a course in the Creighton Model Natural Family Planning method.

On July 1, Dovel and Winters were presented with their certificates of completion by Margaret P. Howard, MAM, CFCE, and enjoyed a celebratory luncheon with other NFP practitioners. The two women will finish up with assignments over the next six months and will sit their final exam in February.

The course instructors were Howard and local physician Joseph Stanford, MD, CFCMC. To train and maintain NFP practitioners, the diocese partners with Stanford, who is affiliated with Intermountain Fertility Care Services.

“It’s a natural, effective way to deal with women’s health, fertility, infertility and your reproductive life,” Stanford said of NFP. “We have resources people should check out.”

The diocese covered the cost of the course for the participants. In return, they have committed to counsel engaged couples preparing for marriage in the diocese for a minimum of two years. Engaged couples who prepare for marriage in the diocese are required to take, at minimum, a one-hour introduction to NFP. Interested couples can then follow up with a practitioner.

Dovel, a St. Olaf parishioner, and Winters, a St. Vincent de Paul parishioner, began the course with a weeklong workshop last September. Dovel and Winters each already have several clients they’re working with under remote supervision from Howard, who returned to Utah the last week of June to provide another week’s course training for the participants.

“It’s a really intensive training that gives you the tools that you need to be a successful practitioner in the Creighton Model,” Winters said of the course. “Now I really feel that it’s coming together. With the additional support and our clinical months to come I think we’ll really be ready to go out and make a difference in the world, to try to bring more awareness to this method of women understanding their own fertility and their own health. It’s a powerful tool and I’m really excited that I’ve learned to teach it to people.”

During the pandemic various diocesan programs including NFP certification had to be put on hold, said Crystal Painter, director of the diocesan Office of Family Life. “This was a reintroduction of our NFP program to the diocese.”

This course is the first step in the diocese getting back on track in this area, she said, but there are plans to expand to include Hispanic Catholics who might be interested in teaching their community, and to offer the introduction sessions to young adult groups in the diocese. Painter hopes, with the practitioners’ help, to be able to provide introduction sessions on a regular basis to couples in the Salt Lake and Ogden areas.

Women or couples interested in learning more about NFP and meeting the practitioners can visit https://www.dioslc.org/offices/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning.

The USCCB has designated July 23-29 as National Natural Family Planning Awareness Week. Resources can be accessed at https://www.usccb.org/topics/natural-family-planning/national-nfp-awareness-week.