Natural Fertility – Hey What?

Couples in the world are adopting Fertility Awareness Methods (FAMs – what used to be called Natural Family Planning) with new vigour as they access them via smartphone apps. And it’s not only conservative Catholics and alternative lifestyle naturalists doing so – ordinary couples who just want a reliable, chemical free alternative are the keenest…

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Openness to Life is for All of Us

It’s not uncommon to have couples of advanced years in the SmartLoving Engaged course. One or both may be widowed or they may have only found love and a vocation to marriage after many decades of single life.  Sometimes they express confusion or frustration that their marriage preparation course includes fertility awareness education. For example, recently a widower in…

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Restoring Fertility…. God’s Way

  The Catholic Church has some surprising treasures. No – we’re not thinking of the Vatican museums or its countless historic churches! We’re thinking of the remarkable services that exist to support couples with subfertility.  Restorative Reproductive Medicine is a rapidly growing field that seeks to treat subfertility by restoring it to healthy functioning, rather…

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The Maybe Baby Conversation

  How do couples decide when and how many children to have? The Maybe Baby Conversation can Help. During our engagement, we took lessons in a Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), then known as Natural Family Planning. Wanting to live a Catholic marriage, we accepted the Church’s wisdom and rejected contraception to follow her moral teaching.…

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Teaching love to university students

Later this year, population experts and pronatalists will meet in Texas to explore practical solutions to declining worldwide fertility. It’s one of several signs that attitudes to fertility rates are shifting. Fertility rates have been in decline for decades, and not just in developed countries like North America, Europe and Australia. China and India have…

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Unplanned Childlessness

“My daughters are in their thirties. They always hoped to marry and planned to be starting a family by now. It is so hard to see them grieving this loss.”   It’s a common story we hear among our peers. Their single children are in their twenties, thirties and forties. Many of these are well past…

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#19 Transition to Parenthood

The transition to parenthood is a challenge for all couples but for a couple that experienced almost a decade of infertility the change from being a married couple with no kids, to parenthood can be a dramatic shift in their identities and relationship. In this podcast Laura and Joseph Cain share their rollercoaster of marriage,…

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Natural Fertility

True love cannot be contained; it always gives life in some form, bursting forth from the couple with irrepressible urgency. For most couples, this life-giving impulse will result in the biological birth of a child. For others, it will be expressed in a shared effort to generously give of their time and talents to others.…

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Catholic Courtship Summit 2022

Do you have a family member or friend that is currently in a serious dating relationship, and you desire to help them discern with more confidence?  If so, please invite them to join us for FREE at the Catholic Courtship Summit  Taking place from 18-20 August 2022.  The Catholic Courtship Summit is targeted for young adult…

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Forward Planning your Family Planning

Some years ago, I (Francine) was teaching a couple fertility awareness. They had been married five years and assumed that once they discontinued the pill, they would get pregnant straight away. Two years later it still wasn’t happening for them. From what I could see, there was nothing obvious in the their fertility biomarkers that…

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