Making Catholic Sex Sexy

Ashley E. McGuire, editor-in-chief of Altcatholicah, on promoting natural family planning in a culture of contraception :

This week is natural family planning awareness week. And during this NFP awareness week, I am acutely aware that 98 percent of Catholic women use contraception of some form.

We need more than an awareness week. The whole Catholic approach to NFP needs a massive overhaul. It simply isn’t working.

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First, it’s poorly branded, if branded at all. Do a quick Google search and you get anything from a clunky website with a picture of the Vatican and the bolded words “ecological breastfeeding” to pictures of cheeky babies everywhere. Lesson number one in marketing: If you are trying to sell to women who are seeking to avoid a pregnancy, maybe baby pictures aren’t the best tactic.

But more importantly, it’s marketed in a profoundly unsexy way. My NFP workbook features on its cover a woman in baggy pastels with a grocery bag balanced on one hip, a baby on the other. Awesome! I want to be her! On the contrary, I find I have not opened it once since getting married.

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