John Paul II Center for Women

I met a firebrand New Yorker at last year’s ENDOW Conference in Denver. Joan is the co-foundress of the John Paul II Center for Women in Manhattan. The John Paul II Center,

is an organization dedicated to advocating a deep understanding of the dignity of women, the meaning of human sexuality, and the nature of human relationships as expressed in the teachings of the Catholic Church. As part of this mission, it is committed to promoting natural family planning, pro-life reproductive health care, and pro-life medical ethics.

They recently reported on their blog their starting an online Infertility Discussion Group:

Finally, we have also started an outreach for pro-life and Catholic women struggling with infertility. This is an email listserv (a “Google Group”) called “Prolife Catholic Infertility.”

We created this in response to requests from Catholic and pro-life women from around the country for a common place to discuss those issues which pro-life women uniquely struggle with as they seek treatment for infertility.

What treatments are available? Which destroy embryos? What does the Catholic Church say about the various alternatives? Where can I turn for help?

Few have been the resources available to you – and many of you have expressed a sense of feeling abandoned by medicine if you do not want to go through with IVF or other artificial reproductive technologies.
At the JPII Center, we hope to eventually create an online resource where you can go to find answers to the common questions about infertility treatment, pro-life alternatives, ethical decision-making, and where you can go for help and support.

This will take some time. In the meantime, we have created this online email discussion group to allow you to network and dialogue with each other about the issues you are dealing with – many of you have already sought and found answers to these common questions and this group allows you to share these answers with others. It is a “closed” group, so only those people I add to the list will have access to the discussions in order to create a “safe space” for you to share your real concerns and questions.We are a Catholic organization, but any woman struggling with infertility who is looking for pro-life alternatives in infertility treatment is welcome to join, regardless of her faith tradition or beliefs.To be added to the list, please email me directly at amielnik@jpiicenterforwomen.org. I need only your name and email address and a brief description of why you are interested in the listserv.

I’m so glad they’ve jumped on the New Media/ Online Discussion train. While one always needs to be prudent about online memberships and discussions, they can also be of enormous help, as it seems with the NFP Facebook group, which is quite active. It’s commonplace for women to travel from Europe, Australia and all over the North America to travel to Omaha just to get their NaProTechnology consultation and treatment, so until we can have NaPro consultants in every parish and surgeons in every metropolitan area, online discussion forums must serve as a place for research and connection.

I only pray that more and more people will train as FertilityCare practitioners, medical consultants and especially as NaProTechnology surgeons. Could you be called to teach NFP or be an NFP-only health professional? Consider it, for the need is great.

Pray for the JP II Center for Women and their mission!

6.2 million women experience some sort of compromised fertility in the United States. Are you one of them? If you are blessed with your full fertility, chances are you know someone who struggles with or has struggled with it.

In this FertilityCare Consult episode, show number fourteen on Infertility, Dr. Thomas Hilgers talks about the major differences between the ordinary approach to treating infertility and the FertilityCare and NaProTechnology way. The ordinary way is to treat the symptoms, and if all else fails, try IVF. The NaProTechnology way is to begin learning about and charting your cycle through the Creighton Method of FertilityCare, then working with your FertilityCare Practitioner and Medical Consultant to identify and diagnose the underlying problem to the compromised fertility. Napro treats the disease, not the symptom, and with much higher success, lower cost and much less suffering.

Do you know the success rate of pregnancies achieved and carried to term with IVF? It’s in the low to mid 20 %. With the Creighton Method of FertilityCare (charting your cycle) and subsequent diagnoses and treatment, do you know what the success rate is? At the lowest, it’s around 35%, and at best 80%, depending on the underlying cause.

If you’ve been having difficulty achieving a pregnancy, or have had recurrent miscarriages, you’ll definitely want to listen to this episode. You may wish to follow up by listening to the episode on Recurrent Miscarriages. So many people have amazing stories of going through the IVF process, only to find disappointment or disillusionment. But there is hope. Please pass this on to any one who might be interested or find healing in new hope for infertility, as well as insight for women’s wellness.