NaProTechnology provides alternative to IVF for couples struggling with infertility

(OSV News) -- Dr. Naomi Whittaker was in the middle of her OB-GYN rotation when she realized that she no longer wanted to practice in women's health. She was done watching patients experience trauma after trauma due to a lack of science and compassion, among other things.

All of that changed, however, when she found herself in the operating room with NaProTechnology surgeons.

"This is good medicine, this is what women need -- this heals them, this heals their heart," she remembered thinking.

Today, Whittaker is a NaProTechnology surgeon herself. She and other OB-GYNs who practice NaProTechnology, which stands for natural procreative technology, spoke with OSV News.

They defined it as a treatment model or women's health science that evaluates, diagnoses and treats the underlying causes of infertility and other gynecological and reproductive issues using a natural family planning, or NFP, method called the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, known as CrMS.

For couples struggling with infertility, these doctors wanted them to know: NaProTechnology offers answers.

"Even if we don't get a baby, they at least feel better that they have answers," said Whittaker, who is located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

A focus on natural family planning

Their comments came ahead of National NFP Awareness Week July 20-26. The week takes place around the anniversary of St. Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, "Humanae Vitae," which warns against the dangers of artificial birth control and contraception. NFP methods such as CrMS cooperate with this teaching by allowing couples to avoid or achieve pregnancy by tracking the fertile window of a woman's cycle.

Dr. Christopher Stroud, an OB-GYN who practices NaProTechnology and the founder of Fertility & Midwifery Care Center and Holy Family Birth Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, described NaProTechnology as the treatment side of CrMS, particularly the surgical treatment side of it.

"When a couple starts trying to use NFP to achieve pregnancy and they're not achieving," he said, "that's when somebody like me comes in with the NaProTechnology and says, ‘Oh look, you've got polycystic ovarian syndrome, you've got untreated thyroid disease, you've got endometriosis. And we need to operate on you to (treat the endometriosis) or you have blocked fallopian tubes' or some of these other things that come to light because of the NFP."

These doctors said they treat patients with infertility and other gynecologic issues while observing their CrMS charts. Different methods track different biological signs, or biomarkers, to follow the phases of a woman's cycle. CrMS relies on the tracking of cervical mucus.

"That's the beauty of how we're designed," said Whittaker, who talks about the benefits of NaProTechnology on social media, including on Instagram where she has more than 30,000 followers. "Our blood flow, our cervical mucus, our cycle length … even our temperature can all tell us of the nature of the body."

An alternative to IVF

Infertility is common, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Around 1 in 5 U.S. married women ages 15 to 49 with no prior births struggle with infertility or are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying.

A growing number of couples struggling with infertility are turning to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a procedure where embryos are created in a laboratory and then transferred to a woman's womb. The doctors speaking with OSV News said that IVF -- which the Catholic Church condemns in part because innocent human lives are lost when "excess" human embryos are discarded or put into deep freeze -- fails to recognize infertility as a symptom of an underlying condition.

"The body is telling us: I should not be pregnant, I have these issues," Dr. Teresa Hilgers, an OB-GYN and associate medical consultant at St. Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Nebraska, said.
NaProTechnology, she said, seeks to treat those issues.

The origins of NaProTechnology

Both Catholic and non-Catholic patients seek out NaProTechnology, which was inspired by Catholic teaching. Hilgers said that her father, Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers, the founder and director of St. Paul VI Institute, co-created CrMS and developed NaProTechnology after reading "Humanae Vitae" as a medical student.

After the creation of CrMS, couples approached her father with different issues, from abnormal bleeding and miscarriage to infertility.

Their charts "had similar patterns to them when they had abnormalities in their health care," Hilgers said her father realized. "He understood that the charts were actually telling him something, and he was able to coordinate medical care with the charting system."

As a board-certified restorative reproductive medicine physician and surgeon, Whittaker said NaProTechnology falls under the umbrella of restorative reproductive medicine.

"It really was the first one to see that biomarkers are a sign of health or not and quantified it scientifically and showed that studies can be done very well that way," she said. "Then they developed a surgery component."

Today, doctors trained in NaProTechnology exist on every continent except Antarctica, Hilgers said. The three doctors who spoke with OSV News received training at the St. Paul VI Institute and now care for patients who travel to them from across the country and even from across the world.

"I think all of us in the NaProTechnology world experience the same thing," Stroud said. "People will wait a long time to see you and they'll travel to see you. … it's very humbling."

An unexpected path

The doctors speaking with OSV News never planned to practice NaProTechnology, they said.

Hilgers wanted to avoid her father's line of work until she felt a tap on the shoulder from God. Whittaker thought NFP was unscientific and unreliable until she learned about CrMS and attended a lecture from St. Paul VI Institute as a medical student. Stroud, a convert to Catholicism, switched from doing IVF referrals, contraception and sterilization to practicing NaProTechnology after a priest in the confessional told him to make a change.

At the time, Stroud expected that his career would end; instead, it exploded. For every patient he lost, another two patients appeared. Today, the walls of his practice are covered with photos of his patients' babies.

A comparison and contrast with IVF

These doctors likened comparing NaProTechnology and IVF to comparing apples and oranges. IVF masks a symptom; NaProTechnology identifies and treats the underlying condition, they said.

Stroud gave an analogy: He envisioned a cardiologist prescribing a patient Percocet pills for pain relief because that patient experiences heart pain on the treadmill. Instead of treating what's wrong with the heart, the doctor is masking the symptom, or the pain.

"In gynecology, that happens every single day," Stroud said. "The woman says, ‘I'm not pregnant,' and they say, ‘Let's do IVF, you'll be pregnant.' And the woman says, ‘But aren't you interested in why I'm not pregnant?'"

Whittaker provided a similar analogy and added that a doctor might order an EKG of the patient to measure and record the heart's activity. The EKG to a cardiologist is like the chart of a woman's cycle to a NaProTechnology physician, she said.

For Catholic couples, Hilgers spoke about the philosophical difference between NaProTechnology and IVF.

"NaProTechnology is completely in line with church teaching in the fact that intercourse for a married couple has a procreative and unitive impact," she said, adding that IVF separates the procreative and unitive aspects.

A source of healing

Whittaker said that NaProTechnology not only restores health, but also assesses and addresses mental health, spiritual and marital health. For her part, she said she nurtures the maternal drive of her patients and reminds them that they are worthy of healing.

"When she walks in the door, she's asking to be a mother, you have to say, ‘You are a mother. Look, you're here fighting for this baby,'" she said of women struggling with infertility.

NaProTechnology sends a message, she said, that leaves women feeling empowered and loved: "I'm trusting you to tell me what's going on with your body so I can help work with your body."