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(Catholic World Report) — Dear Vice President JD Vance:
Your statement – “I realize that there is a part of me – the best part of me – that takes its cue from Catholicism” – is music to my ears.
In fact, it cued me to introduce you to the women’s health science of NaProTechnology – exemplary reproductive medicine that – unlike IVF – is moral to its core.
Exemplary reproductive medicine. Natural Procreative Technology – a dynamic, universal women’s health science developed by Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers and his colleagues at the Saint Paul VI Institute1 – has a distinct set of protocols that treat infertility.
These NaPro procedures have one principal goal in reference to infertile couples: to resolve the condition(s) causing their infertility so they’re better able to achieve a pregnancy within their natural acts of marital relations.
In other words, NaPro infertility protocols take a disease-based approach to infertility or subfertility, viewing it as a symptom of underlying organic, hormonal, or ovulatory dysfunctions.
NaProTechnology, both nationally and internationally, has been extremely successful in identifying and treating infertility precisely because it comprehensively evaluates, diagnoses, and effectively treats the multiple causes of the “symptom” of infertility.2
The Creighton Model FertilityCareSystem of charting allows the patient with infertility to precisely track her cycle as a vital sign. Biomarkers of the underlying causes of her infertility surface on the chart providing woman-specific biofeedback that, in turn, helps to restore her fertility. With these charts, the woman and her husband know their window of fertile days. They know that fertility-focused marital relations increase their chances of getting pregnant.
What’s more, NaPro’s surgical techniques effectively treat the various organic and structural abnormalities that often underlie infertility and do so in a way that prevents postoperative pelvic adhesions that could reduce the infertile patient’s future chances of conceiving.
Moral to its core. Recently, in vitro fertilization has captured some political headlines. But an informed moral assessment would extricate IVF from both the Democrat Party’s “reproductive freedom” plank and the Republicans’ guarantee for its insurance coverage in every state.
In an important passage from Donum Vitae,3 the Roman Catholic Church juxtaposes the moral distinction between what I observe as the respective desire for a baby that characterizes a couple who resort to the women’s health science of Natural Procreative Technology to resolve their infertility to that of an infertile couple who choose to generate a baby through IVF.
In his unique and unrepeatable origin, the child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life. The human person must be accepted in his parents’ act of union and love . . . . [as in NaPro] In reality, the origin of a human person is the result of an act of giving [as in NaPro]. The one conceived must be the fruit of his parents’ love [as in NaPro]. He cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of [IVF] medical or biological techniques (emphasis mine). 4
NaPro’s infertility protocols embody the small “c” catholic truths that Donum Vitae underscores, all the while avoiding the moral deficits of IVF:
(1) They respect the inviolable integrity and right to life of a newly developing baby.
(2) They acknowledge the truth that parents ought to view their baby as a gift, not a right.
(3) They recognize the child’s right to be conceived, gestated, born into, and raised within a heterosexual, until-death-do-we-part marriage.
(4) They assist, not replace, the marital act.
(5) They promote the unitive love meaning of the marital act of sex that’s not only inextricably linked to, but that alone makes sense of, the mystery of sexuality and human procreation.
In sum, NaPro’s infertility protocols provide infertile couples the medical solution that IVF procedures do not. They justly respect and recognize the child as someone equal in personal dignity to them because the sexual act of unitive love is the only reproductive context in which they are able to welcome and love their child unconditionally, as someone whose mere existence is, already, per se, a good.
On a practical note: infertility is on the rise in the U.S. With NaProTechnology, we could lead the world in providing women’s healthcare that gets to the underlying causes of each woman’s unique infertility condition. In fact, since NaPro offers the best outcomes of full-term healthy babies even after IVF failure, the families of the U.S. struggling with infertility would benefit from the development and insurance coverage for NaPro infertility protocols.
At this important convergence in political and medical history, I invite you to dialogue with experts who are witnesses to the power of the NaPro approach backed by 50 years of clinical research.
Sincerely,
Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF, PhD
Director of the Center for NaProEthics, the ethics division of the Saint Paul VI Institute, Omaha, NE
Endnotes:
2 The cumulative pregnancy rate for 1,054 infertile women who were treated at the Saint Paul VI Institute clinic with NaPro for the full spectrum of infertility-causing diseases demonstrates that over 60 percent of these patients became pregnant within 24 months, and nearly 70 percent of them within 36 months. [Thomas W. Hilgers, The Medical & Surgical Practice of NaProTechnology (Omaha, NE: Pope Paul VI Institute, 2004), p. 536] In contrast, the most recent CDC-published data (2022) collected from approximately 390 U.S. Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) centers show a pregnancy rate with IVF techniques of 26 percent per cycles reported. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (2025, February 5). Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Success Rates. Retrieved February 5, 2025 from URL]
3 Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Donum Vitae, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation, 1987. The teaching of Donum Vitae, on the one side, helps the infertile couple responsibly exercise their right to plan their family by directing the couple to an infertility treatment – like NaPro – that provides the couple a reasonable chance of conceiving within their own loving acts of marital union. On the other, DV directs the infertile couple to eschew the unjust choice of laboratory treatments for infertility – like IVF – that harm the whole of their married love by intentionally subverting the essential unitive dimension of their procreative endeavors.