March 3, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — When I got married at the end of 1973 I was a Protestant minister in Germany. My wife, Mishka, was from Prague. So that she could study we decided we needed to postpone having children. Since Protestant churches give no specific advice on the matter, I considered as follows: the IUD is abortifacient and therefore out of the question, barrier methods are unreliable, Catholics have some kind of natural method, which presumably does not work, because they have a lot of children. The only remaining possibility was the pill, which I understood prevents ovulation. I was unaware of its possible abortifacient action. So that was our choice.
Our first child was born in 1976, and returning to the pill Mishka became increasingly unhappy. She resented taking this daily “medicine” when she was not ill. She liked to forget to take it and resented my reminding her. She began to make jokes about divorce, which I thought was in bad taste, for to me divorce was unthinkable.
Then in 1978 we came across a book by Ingrid Trobisch: The Joy of Being a Woman. It contained a chapter on Natural Family Planning and recommended the Sympto-Thermal Method according to the Austrian doctor Josef Roetzer. We bought the book and Mishka proclaimed, “If it works for others it will work for us! I’m not going to take any more pills!”
I was surprised and taken aback by the vehemence of her words. But it was immediately clear to me that for us this was the end of the pill era. How could I have been so insensitive? I hoped the new approach would work, and it did. As Mishka said, “Our marriage blossomed after this.” And she remarked, “Instead of my having to be on call all the time for when you had time, you had to respect me as I was with the periods of fertility and infertility of my cycles.” For me this was no problem, and the marriage act became somehow more authentic.
Because our oldest son was approaching school age we moved to Scotland in 1982, where I became a minister of the Church of Scotland. A colleague introduced me to the NFP materials of the Couple to Couple League. I was intrigued that they were more detailed, and above all, that CCL presented not just a method, but also its theological basis. Realising that contraception produces a negative effect on marriage and towards children, whereas NFP stabilizes marriages and produces a positive attitude towards children, we decided to train as NFP teachers with CCL.
Our attempts to promote NFP in the Church of Scotland were met with derision, and my pro-life activity caused me to be dismissed from my congregations. It was at the time of the Velvet Revolution and CCL agreed to send us to Czechoslovakia to set up CCL in that country. We moved there in 1991 and continue to lead CCL in the Czech Republic. The Slovak organisation is independent. In 1995 we with our whole family joined the Catholic Church.