Book Review: The Sinner's Guide to NFP

Book: The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning
Author: Simcha Fisher
Genre: Sexuality/Marriage/Theology

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Ah, Natural Family Planning: birth control advocates hate it and misunderstand it, and Catholics...hate it and misunderstand it too?

Critiquing the flowery image many NFP supporters often give to the Catholics they teach while still supporting the controversial family planning method, Simcha Fisher tackles the challenge many Catholics couples using NFP face: the fact that they are frustrated by it!  Both defending the Church's stance on NFP and correcting NFPer's misguided assumptions about it, Fisher uses her writing wit to explore a plethora of topics.  Essays are refreshing, new, and just what the Catholic populace needs in this society of artificial birth control and sterilization.

Because of society's negativity towards it, NFP users feel a need to cover up whatever frustrations they have with the natural methods the Church approves.  The whole story of facts being hidden from newly wed and veteran couples alike has lead to more questions being asked and more disappointments than most want to admit.  Couples face questions such as: Would charting be hard?  Would I be able to handle restraining myself on my fertile days?  Can I be critical of NFP but still use it?  Why am I not getting the "honeymoon effect"?  Shouldn't my marriage be fantastic because of NFP, even though we still have problems?  How do I know if I'm using a "contraceptive mindset"?

All that and more is covered in Fisher's book.  A mother herself and well-versed in the spacing methods of NFP, she is blunt but humorous; serious but enjoys the irony; and so on.  She explains the straight up truth of NFP, how it effects a couple and how it can be misused, and how it requires frustrating sacrifice; but in the end, down the road, makes a marriage grow.  Encompassing marriage itself along with sexuality, she dives headfirst into the realities of NFP while debunking both the flowery views of its teachers and the ignorant criticisms of artificial birth control advocates.  Many of them surprised even myself!

Fisher gets into subjects most NFP instructors don't talk about: sexual humor, sexual frustrations in bed, and others.  Fisher also explains how it all ties into God and ourselves, not ever flinching away from Catholic beliefs on the subject.  Explanations are upfront and honest as well as challenging to popular NFP mndsets, one example being how to know if and when a couple should have another child. 

To showcase her work, I will show how Fisher confronts the notion of the so-called "contraceptive mindset", and how only the couple and God can truly know when it is time to hold back from childbearing. Showing the lives and circumstances of different women, Fisher shows how one woman living on 35,000 dollars a year easily lives with six kids as a housewife, while another was formerly wealthy, and feels overwhelmed at the prospect of having another child at that same income!  Or, perhaps we see a woman who let's loose with baby after baby in order to ignore her out of control eating habit, while another woman restrains from having anymore children because she fears gaining even one pound will set her back into her anorexic disorder.  With these scenerios, the reader is shown that we can never know when a couple is using a so-called "contraceptive mindset"; whether or not a couple is ready for another child is something that is only known between said couple and God.

As a Catholic housewife myself - and having just delivered my first child almost a month ago - this book really is a great motivator and reality check for helping my husband and I approach NFP.  I was relieved to read from a fellow laywoman about the ups and downs of using natural methods, and to know that someone like me out there understands.  Other reviewers have said this already, but I must repeat them here: give this book to your parish, to new couples, to your priest, and every other Catholic under the Sun.  It's time we have educated ourselves fully to the hard yet fulfilling experience that is Natural Family Planning.