You can do the Marquette Model without observing mucus, but it may cut you a day short at the beginning of Phase II.

Thanks for the link. However, mucus (or lack thereof) was not an effective sign for my wife. We’re looking at the LadyComp (German-made). Have you heard anything about it or other options?

Marquette University’s Institute for Natural Family Planning has a relatively new NFP method that uses the ClearBlue Easy Fertility Monitor, a device used at home which measures hormone levels in urine to estimate the beginning and end of the time of fertility in a women’s menstrual cycle. The information from the monitor can be used in conjunction with other biological indicators of fertility. This method seems very useful in helping a woman better understand and interpret her fertility “signals” since the monitor can help back up her visible observations.

You can check them out at http://nfp.marquette.edu

Interestingly, their new website is going to have access to online discussion with professional NFP doctors and nurses as well as Catholic theologians with bioethics backgrounds. I am very exciting that they are treating both the physical and spiritual aspects of NFP together. They just launched the new site yesterday so we’ll see if it delivers.

Casti Connubii:

Some justify* this criminal abuse on the ground that they are weary of children and wish to gratify their desires without their consequent burden. Others say that they cannot on the one hand remain continent nor on the other can they have children because of the difficulties whether on the part of the mother or on the part of family circumstances .

54. But no reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.

[...]

60. We are deeply touched by the sufferings of those parents who, in extreme want, experience great difficulty in rearing their children.

61. However, they should take care lest the calamitous state of their external affairs should be the occasion for a much more calamitous error. No difficulty can arise that justifies the putting aside of the law of God which forbids all acts intrinsically evil. There is no possible circumstance in which husband and wife cannot, strengthened by the grace of God, fulfill faithfully their duties and preserve in wedlock their chastity unspotted. This truth of Christian Faith is expressed by the teaching of the Council of Trent. “Let no one be so rash as to assert that which the Fathers of the Council have placed under anathema, namely, that there are precepts of God impossible for the just to observe. God does not ask the impossible, but by His commands, instructs you to do what you are able, to pray for what you are not able that He may help you.”[48]

What is a couple to do when they can’t find a NFP method that they can practice? And by physically practice, I mean that a woman’s body doesn’t send the “signals” necessary to carry out the method.

Now that I’m experiencing the responsibility that comes with just one child, I’m starting to understand just what a grave responsibility parenthood is. Somehow, the alternative, abstinence until menopause, doesn’t seem so life giving in a married relationship either.

RCM: I’m not sure exactly what the point was to your reply to me, in part because you quote both me and another commenter in a mixed attribution as if I were the author of the entire quote. I wasn’t judging anyone in particular’s motives. I was talking about objective criteria. We may not be able to tell everyone’s motives, but surely we can truthfully say things like “if such and such a motive obtains, it implies thus and so”.

Furthermore, ‘serious reasons’ are not strictly interior subjective psychological criteria. Reasons are either objectively grave, or not, and if we know what the reasons are – a critical ‘if’ to be sure – then surely we can assess their gravity with some degree of objectivity.

You can’t go around being God, knowing what only a couple can know, yet the original post here and similar posts elsewhere, and the comboxes here and elsewhere are filled with nothing but that attitude when it comes to people who don’t use NFP but who are just as open to life as those who do and who may even be MORE open to life than some of those who do. And that’s why people blow this stuff off — because you strike at the heart of what is most dear, most precious to them on this planet and insult and demean something God has put together.

You don’t go about winning hearts and minds by slamming doors in people’s faces and that’s exactly what that sort of rhetoric does.

This world sees a Church that systematically failed its people over decades and decades (and that’s just recent history!), that knowingly and willingly subjected its children to horrific abuse, that dismissed half its population in the worst possible ways, often leading to their deaths, and then they hear some johnny-come-lately spout all sorts of negative and insulting nonsense about their marriages — about the partner that has given them more in the way of love and kindness and compassion and loyalty than the Catholic Church ever did, and all they see are a pack of hypocrites who are desperately trying to convince themselves that the little hoops they create for themselves to jump through are real suffering and make them better than other people.

And they are exactly right — when NFP is used with contraceptive intent and/or for other than grave reasons.”

How on earth can WE judge other peoples’ motives UNLESS they have expressed those motives to us? I don’t know how we can go around being God and knowing what only a couple should know.