Infertile couple

There is an infertile married couple in my parish. They have been trying to have children for several years now, with no success. Are there any resources I might refer them to in order to help them?

This is a situation that must be handled with the utmost delicacy and compassion. While millions of women deliberately kill their unborn children through abortion, infertile couples echo Rachel’s cry: “Give me children or I will die!” [Genesis 30:1]. Nobody who has not experienced it can understand the depths of the couple’s longing to see a part of each other reflected in a child they yearn to give life to, a future citizen of this world and of Heaven, and their thirst to participate in the great adventure and great challenge of raising a child. Truly, an infertile couple feels as if their life is not complete as they experience the monthly hope and disappointment that seems to become more and more inevitable.
Infertility is usually diagnosed if a couple cannot conceive over a period of one year or suffers three or more consecutive miscarriages. An inability to conceive might be caused by one or more of the following: Failure of the wife to ovulate, low sperm count, endometriosis, a blocked Fallopian tube, the impacts of previous abortions or prolonged use of certain birth control methods, bad nutrition or sleeping habits, or environmental factors.
One might begin by asking if the couple is using a method of natural family planning (NFP) that includes charting the wife’s cycles, such as the sympto-thermal method or the Creighton method. If they are not using one of these methods, they might want to learn how, because NFP can be used to achieve as well as avoid pregnancy. The Couple to Couple League (www.ccli.org) has thousands of teaching couples around the world who can do two-on-two instruction to help them learn the symptom-thermal method.
If this is not possible, another resource is Dr. Thomas Hilgers' NaProTechnology (Natural Procreative Technology), which uses fertility care, not fertility control, as its primary approach. Its basic concept is to carefully monitor, chart and use various hormonal events during the menstrual cycle in order to provide information that the woman and qualified physicians can use to identify problems that might be interfering with the wife’s fertility.1

1. See the NaProTechnology Web site at www.naprotechnology.com for more information on this method.