The day before the party, doctors, gynaecologists, midwives and FertilityCare practitioners gathered at the Galway Clinic for a medical education session presented by Drs Hilgers, Boyle, Monaghan and Stanford explaining NaProTechnology, its medical and surgical aspects, patient outcomes and effectiveness for couples with infertility and miscarriage.
Dr Phil Boyle’s Galway based practice, the focus for the party, is a busy, full-time practice involving three doctors. Dr Anne Carus of the Life FertilityCare Clinic in the UK has worked there over the last three years in addition to her UK work. The UK practice, supported by the Life charity has been run from the Liverpool based Life Health Centre. However with the charity’s move to refurbished premises in Leamington Spa in summer 2008, the Life FertilityCare Clinic will be relocating to a newly equipped clinic base within the same building. Couples travel from all over the UK to obtain the unique approaches of FertilityCare and NaProTechnology provided by the clinic and will undoubtedly benefit from the easier road and rail access the new location provides.
Dr Carus commented ‘we are delighted to be securing a permanent base in the Midlands, the Birmingham Archdiocese has always been supportive and interested in our work and the time has come to expand our availability to all married couples seeking an ethically acceptable approach to their distress of infertility or recurrent miscarriage’.
For many couples, finding FertilityCare and NaProTechnology is a ‘homecoming’ to care that places their married relationship centrally in the teamwork and teaching to support their ability to conceive and carry to term their own child. So many express what one couple voiced ‘this is what we were looking for all along, we only wish we had known about it sooner’.
Many couples tell of their experience at infertility clinics when they express concern over the assisted reproductive technologies or discomfort with embryo manipulation and storage. They are typically offered no other way forward. In addition to the emotional roller coaster of despair and frustration at their infertility they have no professionally supported route to follow.
FertilityCare started out as a standardised approach to natural family planning in the 1980’s. In the years following Dr Hilgers increasingly recognised the power of the information stored in the FertilityCare charting records and its potential to help identify issues relevant to restoring more normal fertility and monitoring medical strategies put in place to support couples. Out of this, the methodical approach of NaProTechnology was born. Incorporating many traditional treatments to support fertility, now increasingly marginalised by the impetus and drive that has accompanied the assisted reproductive technologies, but applying them with fresh vision and understanding to the unique fertility chart record of each couple, many pregnancies and babies result for couples previously told they would never conceive their own child. The 500 of the 800 plus naturally conceived children at the 10 year NaProTechnology party are a powerful testament to its success.
The Church teaches that the assisted reproductive techniques are not acceptable because the unity of the couple and respect for the unique individuals created by these technologies are breached. It is very hard for couples to accept these teachings, in their desperation to conceive, unless there are pro-life, pro-Catholic alternatives available. It is important to add though, that many, many couples benefiting from NaProTechnology are not Catholics and may also have failed with in vitro fertilisation (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) or intrauterine insemination (IUI) in the past.
The FertilityCare and NaProTechnology trained staff have great skill and empathy but readily acknowledge the tremendous privilege they have in working with the courageous couples who come to us for help.
For more information please contact www.lifefertilitycare.co.uk or the Liverpool clinic on 0151 220 9495
