Dear Colleague:
For 30 years, Family of the Americas Foundation has spread practical
knowledge about life and procreation around the world.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
14 July 2006
Vol. 8, No. 27
Help for Families in the Americas and Beyond
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
Governments around the world extract from their peoples billions of
dollars annually to promote birth control. People are told that they
shouldn't have more than one or two children and are continually
propagandized to use the pill, condoms, IUDs, Depo-Provera, or other
methods of artificial birth control used to decrease populations. Then
many billions more are spent annually by health insurers and people
themselves to use these methods, and then billions more to control the
side effects.
Founded in 1977, Family of the Americas Foundation (FAF) offers an
alternative approach to procreation, one that does not denigrate the
creation of new human life, has no side effects, and costs nothing. FAF,
headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, is led by Mercedes Arzú
Wilson, the sister of a former president of Guatemala, and teaches
globally the Billings method of natural family planning (NFP). FAF's
materials are in 21 languages, and Wilson goes even to countries such as
Communist China to teach NFP.
FAF is unconditionally pro-life, and "even when I am in China, I denounce
abortion," said Wilson, who first learned the ovulation method of NFP in
Humanae Vitae's year of 1968. "They keep inviting us back." So FAF is
active well beyond the Americas, with NFP teacher training programs for
nations in Africa, Asia, and Europe as well.
NFP allows a woman to identify the approximately 100 hours a month when
she is fertile, allowing her and her husband to decide when to have
marital relations. NFP requires a little work and some discipline-much
more than taking a pill-but has a very high success rate with no negative
health effects for women.
The most reliable forms of artificial birth control do not have higher
rates of success than NFP, and they have serious side effects. The pill
contains hormones that disrupt a woman's natural reproductive cycle, as do
other methods of artificial birth control. "They are steroids. You know
how people get upset with athletes taking steroids?" said Wilson. "What
about all these teenagers taking steroids?" It's no coincidence, she
said, that "breast cancer is up 40% in the past 30 years."
Even worse, "most artificial methods cause abortions," said Wilson. "The
pill, Depo-Provera, the patch cause more abortions than surgical
abortions." This fact, she noted, is often ignored by some in the
pro-life movement who campaign against only the more obvious forms of
abortion. Yet hormonal contraceptives do not always prevent conception,
but sometimes allow conception and then kill the conceived child.
FAF is very active in the United States, "with teachers in every state,"
said Wilson, who said that no one who went through an FAF program has ever
told her, "NFP doesn't work for us and we're going back to artificial
methods."
NFP also helps many couples conceive children by identifying the times
marital relations would be most likely to result in pregnancy. Without
NFP, many couples would have great difficulty in having children.
Some have criticized NFP when used to delay pregnancy as encouraging the
contraceptive mentality. Wilson said that FAF does not advocate NFP as
just "Catholic birth control."
"We teach as Catholics teach that you have to have a serious reason to use
NFP," she said.
Wilson, author of Love and Family (Ignatius Press) and the forthcoming
Love and Fertility (published by FAF), believes that "pornographic sex
education is the greatest sin. They are destroying the innocence of
children." During the Reagan Administration, FAF received a grant for its
own kind of sex education, designed for parents in order to assist them in
educating their children, and "we cut teen pregnancy with our programs to
one-twentieth of the national average," she said proudly.
Wilson has also done work combating human rights abuses in her native
Guatemala, where poor rural women are sometimes forced into sterilization
by population control-minded health officials. "Mercedes has done more
than any other person to bring to light abuses of women in U.S.-funded
family planning programs in Guatemala, and to give them alternatives
through the teaching of natural family planning," says Steve Mosher,
President of PRI.
Wilson also points to the success of NFP programs in helping to keep
families together in this time of vast social breakdown. In fact, NFP
couples reached by FAF have an amazingly low 0.2% divorce rate, according
to a study Wilson wrote for the November 2002 Catholic Social Science
Review. "Using data collected from a sample of women in the United States
of America who practice natural family planning and comparing them to
well-known national surveys, this study examines the effects of natural
family planning and artificial birth control on several dimensions of
marital and family life," wrote Wilson. "The study finds that NFP women
have lower rates of abortion and divorce (0.2%), than women in the
national samples." The study is posted in the download section of FAF's
website, www.familyplanning.net.
She said that the divorce rate was extremely low even among non-Catholic
couples using NFP. "NFP requires the husband and wife to cooperate in
making the life decision," she said. "If a man loves his wife, he wants
to protect her, and then he doesn't want her to take steroids or use other
kinds of birth control with serious side effects."
Wilson is very concerned about the collapse of birthrates around the
world. "There is a new graph from the World Bank that says the birthrate
of the world could be below two by 2023," she said. Nevertheless,
contraceptive and feminist programs continue to pour into the Third World.
And not only for the Third World: As Wilson noted, the federal Title X
law "funds chemical warfare against women and teenage girls around the
country."
Said Wilson, "The problem is in Washington, D.C."
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
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Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
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