Should Natural Family Planning be Automated?
Should NFP Embrace Technology?
In developing a Natural Family Planning (NFP) app, there can be a lot of hesitancy around trusting your fertility and family planning to an app, and for good reason: the stakes are really high. If an app oversimplifies Natural Family Planning, you run the risk of couples not actually learning about their bodies or engaging with the complexity of their fertility — which are core components of NFP.
On the other hand, if we disregard user experience and double down on tried and true manual charting methods, we run the risk of not catching the wave of opportunity that we’re seeing in our culture right now. Natural fertility methods used to be just for Catholics and homeschoolers (of which I am both) but now it’s really cool. Yeah you heard me, we were into natural methods before it was cool.
But really, we see these big apps taking off like Clue and Natural Cycles, but is anybody in the mainstream talking about Marquette or Creighton? From what I hear from my wife, who is a labour and delivery nurse, no one even knows what NFP is. Her coworkers are increasingly interested in chemical free contraception methods, tracking their cycles, and wearables but established and thoroughly researched family planning methods barely enter the conversation. The only time NFP came up in nursing school was when she was taught that it has the lowest efficacy rates… which is simply untrue.
The goal here isn’t to make NFP as popular as other fertility awareness methods for the sake of popularity, it’s to make NFP a real part of the conversation. It needs to be a tool that couples see as powerful, effective, and simple to use. Without that, we not only risk losing the next generation of Catholics looking for easier ways to chart, we also miss the opportunity to evangelize beyond parish marriage prep courses and bring the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of our God-given design to a wider audience that is clearly thirsting for more from their fertility.
Marquette NFP™ as the Middle Ground
This brings us to a cross-roads. Do we sell out and try to cater to the whims of the current cultural craze, or do we dig in our heels?
Both-and.
I think there’s a balanced approach here, and this is where the Marquette NFP™ Method (MM) comes in. The method in general, and the app in particular, lends itself to the middle ground here for three reasons:
It’s simple without oversimplifying.
Unlike other apps, we don’t use a hidden proprietary algorithm to guess when you’re fertile. We use the same old MM which is backed by years of academic research and use.
I can see how hiding the "smarts" might increase the marketing edge for other fertility apps but it doesn’t do anything for the empowerment and education of the couples using them. We are loud and proud of the fact that our app does nothing special — and that’s kind of the point: we don’t have to choose between an app that’s easy to use and a method that couples actually understand. The MM is the middle ground that can give us both.
It provides guidance without replacing instruction
Mainstream fertility apps are designed to give you an answer: enter your data, do what the app says. It feels like the less you understand about how it arrived at that answer, the better.
NFP takes the opposite approach. Couples work with an instructor to learn the method and interpret their charts. Education is at its core. The MM gives us room between the two: its protocols are simple enough for an app to be a useful tool while keeping instruction non-negotiable.
The goal is not, and will never be, to replace instructors, or monopolize instruction but rather to make it easier than ever to find and work with instructors. Instruction isn’t a support service bolted onto the method, it's an integral part of the method itself.
It’s objective without asking for blind trust.
Traditional NFP signs like temperature and cervical mucus can require a fair bit of interpretation. Mainstream fertility apps seem to offer a clearer answer, but only if you’re willing to trust an algorithm you can’t see.
The MM gives us both. Your primary source of certainty is a clear hormone reading, while the method remains simple enough to apply and understand for yourself. It reduces the guess work and variability without replacing them with blind trust. Couples get the clarity they’re looking for from modern fertility technology while still understanding where the answer comes from.
The Marquette Method Deserves an App.
This is not a comprehensive list of why you should be interested in the MM, and it isn’t saying that we’ve made the perfect app (yet). But I think it makes a strong case for why the MM deserves an app of its own.
We don’t have to choose between preserving what makes NFP NFP and building something people actually want to use. The MM gives us room to do both: make charting simpler, more helpful, and more approachable without giving up education, instruction, or understanding.
