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No Other Option

Monterey Diocese Cuts Off Natural Family Planning Class

By Julia Winston

The June 3, 2000 edition of the Santa Cruz Sentinel ran an unqualified endorsement of natural family planning and referred readers to natural family planning classes offered at Dominican Santa Cruz Hospital. Two days later, the monthly introductory session given by NFP instructor Sheila St. John, was packed with people wanting to learn the method. But St. John had to inform her listeners that this was to be the last class at the hospital, as administrators had notified her that day they were closing her down. The surprise move leaves the diocese of Monterey with no resources for people wanting to learn natural family planning.

Some observers accuse the hospital and the diocese of indifference or even hostility toward natural family planning, and point to the fact that Dominican Hospital, with special permission from the bishop of Monterey, began performing tubal ligations in 1992. According to St. John, there is no lack of interest in the community for natural family planning. In July, Planned Parenthood's Watsonville office contacted St. John and asked her to teach natural family planning methods. Natividad County Hospital in Salinas also expressed interested in holding Spanish classes.

Sheila St. John taught natural family planning classes at the Dominican hospital for 17 years. Each month, she held an introductory session, often attended by couples in marriage preparation programs at local parishes, but with more than half the participants non-Catholics wanting to learn an alternative to artificial contraception. Others were there because of difficulty becoming pregnant, referred to the class by local doctors to help them pinpoint their fertile days. After the introductory sessions, interested couples would continue to meet one-on-one with St. John (usually eight times over one year) for detailed assistance in charting and understanding their cycles.

Oversight of the program by hospital administrators, says St. John, was never very close. She says the program received little notice until March, when St. John presented the hospital with what she thought was routine paperwork affiliating the popular Creighton program with a new name, Fertility Care Services. "There was no change in what we were doing," said St. John. "It was just a marketing strategy. When we call it NFP, people think 'rhythm," and we never get anywhere." In March, hospital president Sister Julie Hyer, requested a meeting with St. John to discuss the name change. Also at the meeting was hospital education and communications director Penny Jacobi (to whom St. John reported) and Catholic Charities head Martina O'Sullivan. St. John expected to discuss the name change, but the hospital personnel questioned her in detail about the program and requested follow-up documentation about the Creighton model. St. John sent them a large packet of information and awaited their response.

The response came on June 5, in the form of an e-mail stating that St. John's office at the hospital was to be closed and the phone taken away. They wanted her to continue to teach the monthly introductory sessions, but not to meet privately with couples. She was not to use the term "fertility care." She could not hold sessions unless a certain minimum number of people attended. According to St. John, the hospital canceled orders of supplies that had been made for the program.

No other explanation was offered, St. John says, since that day. People who had used the program -- couples, priests who referred engaged couples and doctors -- have told St. John that their calls to the hospital requesting information on the NFP program were never returned. One parish marriage preparation worker, Anthony Russo at Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Watsonville notes that he contacted Dominican Hospital several times, trying to find out why the program had closed. "They indicated it was a move made from a diocesan point of view and it wasn't controllable from their standpoint," says Russo. But the story according to a January 4 call to Sr. Maureen Rooney, administrative assistant in the pastoral office, was that St. John had quit and the program would reopen when a replacement could be hired. Penny Jacobi, in a January 4 phone interview, stated that the hospital had submitted the request for a name change to "the medical staff," who decided to close the program, who complained that it had no "medical supervision." Jacobi declined to state what "medical staff" made the decision or on what basis.

Although St. John could have continued to teach the programs, and offer couples the option of coming to her Salinas office (nearly an hour away) for appointments, St. John declined. "What they were going to offer couples would not help the couples -- telling them what NFP is but not teaching them how to use it," she said. St. John also notes that The U.S. Bishops, in their November, 1994 Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, required that natural family planning instruction be offered at all Catholic hospitals. St. John said, "I didn't want to help the hospital give the appearance of satisfying that directive while not really satisfying it -- providing a description of but not instruction in NFP."

Amy Weigel of Capitola was at St. John's last seminar at Dominican Hospital. She and her husband, Michael, fallen-away Catholics since childhood, returned to the Church in 1999. After living together for 15 years, they were married in the Church. They had one child the following year, and then looked to the program at Dominican Hospital for instruction in a family planning method. With Amy's job teaching English at Santa Cruz High School their main source of income, they could not afford to risk another pregnancy. The fact that she was still nursing their daughter complicated matters, as she needed Sheila's expert guidance to discern which of her fertility signs were true indicators of fertility and which were due to hormonal changes of breastfeeding.

Weigel said, "To me, it's a Catholic hospital and their responsibility is to provide NFP," she says. "The teaching of the Church is that artificial contraception is wrong. Yet the one and only source of NFP, the Catholic hospital here, doesn't offer the services. When you call the hospital to ask what happened to the NFP program, they refer you to the diocese. When you call the diocese, they refer you to Dominican Hospital. We are just trying to live our faith faithfully and it seems that the people who should be helping us with that -- the diocese and Catholic hospital, are making it difficult, if not impossible, to do that." Weigel says she has noticed hostility to natural family planning programs in the diocese. "When we went to the Engaged Encounter," she says, "we got a big shock. We thought we would be among Catholics and would hear about teachings on artificial contraception. We were the only couple in a group of 25 who said we would not use artificial contraception. We had to defend the faith. Other couples claimed their priests said contraception is okay if not using it would put an undue burden on the relationship and that you have to decide within your own conscience. Even the priest sitting there with us didn't clearly state the Church's teaching. This whole thing with NFP is just another barrier that's being put in front of us to try to prevent us from living our faith in this diocese."

Dea Evans also attended the last natural family planning seminar at Dominican Hospital in June. She and her husband, Jim, converted to Catholicism five years ago. Evans said that the RCIA program they attended never mentioned that artificial contraception is a sin. Last year, a priest told her in confession that artificial birth control is wrong and referred her to the natural family planning program at Dominican Hospital. Evans attended the June seminar, but when trying to sign up for individual instruction after the class, was told by St. John that the Dominican program was closing. "I have no access now to natural family planning," says Evans. "I can meet with Sheila in Salinas, but we have only one vehicle and it's impossible for me to go." Evans attempted to chart her cycles based on the information she received in the introductory seminar, but, like Amy, she was nursing her previous baby and her symptoms were confusing. After four months of charting, she became pregnant with her fourth child. Dea Evan's husband, Jim, says that as a new convert, he was surprised by the lack of support services the diocese offers Catholic families. "From the information I've read, the bishops are supposed to make NFP instruction available to us," he said. "We were very disappointed to find out that they had canceled the classes there for no particular reason that I could find. I feel honesty should be one of the priorities, but I found that there was no real reason why they cut that program off at the hospital."

According to Penny Jacobi, Dominican Hospital plans to reopen the NFP program in the spring or summer. She stated, "We didn't close it; we stopped providing it because the instructor did not wish to continue." She was unable to comment on questions about why the program was cut back so sharply that St. John did not wish to continue teaching at the hospital. However, as of January 3, the job listings on Dominican Hospital's web site did not include any positions for a natural family planning instructor.

For information about natural family planning, contact Sheila St. John at (831) 443-3746, or visit the California Association of Natural Family Planning web site at www.canfp.org.

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