St. John Paul II’s teachings can help students navigate through cultural confusions

"I just don’t feel right,” the post-partum mom told me as we waited together outside the classroom to pick up our preschoolers. She’d just had her third C-section three weeks earlier and her incision wasn’t healing well. She also shared with me that she’d had an IUD placed during the C-section. “I don’t do hormones, so this was our only option,” she said. She had three children spaced closely and her body needed a break. But she was worried and uncomfortable about what the IUD might be doing to her body, in addition to her other post-partum complications. “Have you heard of natural family planning?” I asked her. “NFP is completely healthy, with no side effects. It’s highly effective, and it’s good for your relationship as well.” She was interested and asked me to bring her more information next time we met outside the preschool door. 

"The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of woman is being achieved in its fullness, the hour in which woman acquires in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at this moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women impregnated with the spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid mankind in not falling.” – Pope St. Paul VI, Address to Women at the Close of Vatican II, December 8, 1965