Dear Vice-President Vance:
Your statement—“I realize that there is a part of me—the best part of me—that takes its cue from Catholicism”—is music to my ears.
In fact, it cued me to introduce you to the women’s health science of NaProTechnology—exemplary reproductive medicine that—unlike IVF—is moral to its core.
Exemplary reproductive medicine. Natural Procreative Technology—a dynamic, universal women’s health science developed by Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers and his colleagues at the Saint Paul VI Institute1—has a distinct set of protocols that treat infertility.
These NaPro procedures have one principal goal in reference to infertile couples: to resolve the condition(s) causing their infertility so they’re better able to achieve a pregnancy within their natural acts of marital intercourse.
In other words, NaPro infertility protocols take a disease-based approach to infertility or subfertility, viewing it as a symptom of underlying organic, hormonal, or ovulatory dysfunctions.
NaProTechnology, both nationally and internationally, has been extremely successful in identifying and treating infertility precisely because it comprehensively evaluates, diagnoses, and effectively treats the multiple causes of the “symptom” of infertility.2
The Creighton Model FertilityCare System of charting allows the patient with infertility to precisely track her cycle as a vital sign. Biomarkers of the underlying causes of her infertility surface on the chart providing woman-specific biofeedback that, in turn, helps to restore her fertility. With these charts, the woman and her husband know their window of fertile days. They know that fertility-focused intercourse increases their chances of getting pregnant.
What’s more, NaPro’s surgical techniques effectively treat the various organic and structural abnormalities that often underlie infertility and do so in a way that prevents postoperative pelvic adhesions that could reduce the infertile patient’s future chances of conceiving.
Moral to its core. Recently, in vitro fertilization has captured some political headlines. But an informed moral assessment would extricate IVF from both the Democrat Party’s “reproductive freedom” plank and the Republicans’ guarantee for its insurance coverage in every state.
In an important passage from Donum Vitae,3 the Roman Catholic Church juxtaposes the moral distinction between what I observe as the respective desire for a baby that characterizes a couple who resort to the women’s health science of Natural Procreative Technology to resolve their infertility to that of an infertile couple who choose to generate a baby through IVF.
In his unique and unrepeatable origin, the child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life. The human person must be accepted in his parents’ act of union and love . . . . [as in NaPro] In reality, the origin of a human person is the result of an act of giving [as in NaPro]. The one conceived must be the fruit of his parents’ love [as in NaPro]. He cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of [IVF] medical or biological techniques (emphasis mine). 4
NaPro’s infertility protocols embody the small “c” catholic truths that Donum vitae underscores, all the while avoiding the moral deficits of IVF:
(1) They respect the inviolable integrity and right to life of a newly developing baby.
(2) They acknowledge the truth that parents ought to view their baby as a gift, not a right.
(3) They recognize the child’s right to be conceived, gestated, born into, and raised within a heterosexual, until-death-do-we-part marriage.
(4) They assist, not replace, the marital act.
(5) They promote the unitive love meaning of the marital act of sex that’s not only inextricably linked to, but that alone makes sense of, the mystery of sexuality and human procreation.
In sum, NaPro’s infertility protocols provide infertile couples the medical solution that IVF procedures do not. They justly respect and recognize the child as someone equal in personal dignity to them because the sexual act of unitive love is the only reproductive context in which they are able to welcome and love their child unconditionally, as someone whose mere existence is, already, per se, a good.
On a practical note: infertility is on the rise in the U.S. With NaProTechnology, we could lead the world in providing women’s healthcare that gets to the underlying causes of each woman’s unique infertility condition. In fact, since NaPro offers the best outcomes of full-term healthy babies even after IVF failure, the families of the U.S. struggling with infertility would benefit from the development and insurance coverage for NaPro infertility protocols.
At this important convergence in political and medical history, I invite you to dialogue with experts who are witnesses to the power of the NaPro approach backed by fifty years of clinical research.
Sincerely,
Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF, PhD
Director of the Center for NaProEthics, the ethics division of the Saint Paul VI Institute, Omaha, NE
Endnotes:
2 The cumulative pregnancy rate for 1,054 infertile women who were treated at the Saint Paul VI Institute clinic with NaPro for the full spectrum of infertility-causing diseases demonstrates that over 60 percent of these patients became pregnant within twenty-four months, and nearly 70 percent of them within thirty-six months. [Thomas W. Hilgers, The Medical & Surgical Practice of NaProTechnology (Omaha, NE: Pope Paul VI Institute, 2004), p. 536] In contrast, the most recent CDC-published data (2022) collected from approximately 390 U.S. Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) centers show a pregnancy rate with IVF techniques of 26% per cycles reported. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (2025, February 5). Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Success Rates. Retrieved Feb. 5, 2025 from URL]
3 Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Donum Vitae, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation, 1987. The teaching of Donum vitae, on the one side, helps the infertile couple responsibly exercise their right to plan their family by directing the couple to an infertility treatment—like NaPro—that provides the couple a reasonable chance of conceiving within their own loving acts of marital union. On the other, DV directs the infertile couple to eschew the unjust choice of laboratory treatments for infertility—like IVF—that harm the whole of their married love by intentionally subverting the essential unitive dimension of their procreative endeavors.
4 Ibid., Part II, section B, chapter 4C.
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Thank you Sister Renée,
Vance Needs Remedial Catechesis on Abortifacients & Marriage/Family
https://www.catholic365.com/article/41679/vance-needs-remedial-catechesis-on-abortifacients-marriagefamily.html
Joe, why not get in touch with him. I’m sure he’d appreciate your instructing him on the nuances of the Catholic faith.
You’re such a MAGA cultist, dude. Vance is clearly at odds with Catholic teaching here. But then you know that – hence why you’re trying to cope so lamely.
We have a Pope who gives a wink and a nod to homosexuality. But to a Republican VP on the matter of IVF, some want to lower the boom. Interesting, indeed.
please watch the warehouses of wooden beams for the splinter blindness and temptation and lies – all know well the boom has been and continues to be, and will continue to be, on the Francis elements, it is not absent…if honest one would say that winks and nods are given to both Francis and Vance as well as the boom….judge rightly so that you can with the Teacher fully trained, help remove both splinters and beams, from self, first, and others, next…..blessings
Well-presented and beautifully written, Sister. Here, here.
Bless you for the explanation! 🙏
Excellent letter.
One addition:
(6) NaPro’s infertility protocols treat the woman as a patient who ought to be healed and healthy, not a malfunctioning machine that must be replaced with a petri dish.
Amen, Amanda.
My view is that any public communication, to or about a prominent, influential Catholic who has been making pro-IVF public statements, should, for the sake of clarity, quote verbatim what that Catholic has said about IVF.
I think that should be the starting point.
Then the science of what IVF involves should be stated.
Then the Church’s moral teaching on IVF should be stated.
Then moral alternatives to IVF should be stated.
This open letter never says exactly what Mr. Vance has said about IVF.
This open letter never draws the logical conclusion that being pro-IVF is really the same as being pro-abortion.
Forgive me, but we are 50 years into this nightmare of legalized abortion in the USA, and the days of being hesitant or circumspect about speaking the blunt truth seem to be long gone.
We live in a country in which the Supreme Court says that the national Constitution says that Americans are free to kill to innocent persons on a mass scale, and in which both major parties approve, promote, and defend IVF.
Church, be peaceful, be charitable, but also be brave!
That’s silly, unless your point is that you want nothing said at all. This is meant to be a letter, not a book. Vance’s problem is a spiritual problem that comes from his will and his choice, not an intellectual problem based on what he does not know.
I would be very surprised if this letter has any more effect on Vance than it would have on Biden, even if either of them had ever been aware of its existence. More’s the pity.
I don’t think you understand the purpose of open letters. The author almost never intends to influence in direct fashion the mind of the addressee, though that certainly would be a desirable outcome. Rather, it is to take the addressee’s expressed point of view and use that to make a contrasting argument from which the author intends the broader readership will benefit. In this instance, Sr. Renee has certainly succeeded here.
Both Trump and Vance promised to protect all human life and now they’re cowardly retracting. Shameful, Lord have mercy on them!
Not in the immediate runup to the last election. On the contrary, Trump had the pro-life and pro-family planks removed from the GOP platform, and back last October he called himself “the father of IVF”. Some of what he is doing is him taking seriously things that just about everyone considered a bad joke (like the “Gulf of America”), and some of it has come as a total surprise. The support for IVF is neither of those. This is Trump keeping campaign promises, much like Jephthah keeping his rash vow.
Vance is only repeating what he has been told to say. Vice Presidents are simply sycophants to the President.
If Vance is a sycophantic puppet because of his wrong stance on IVF, where does that leave you re: your public rejection of the Church’s teaching on contraceptives?
I am entitled to my opinion. How does not accepting the ban on contraception make me a sycophant? A Sycophant of who?
By the way, 90+% of the laity and many Priests agree with me. Why do you bring this up?
Oh yes, you have to defend Trump and his lap dog. Attacks on Pope Francis are OK, but Trump & Co, must be defended.
Your boy is destroying the country to help the billionaires. Is that Catholic?
Credit where credit is due: you stay on message, no matter how incoherent or incorrect it is.
“By the way, 90+% of the laity and many Priests agree with me.”
Even if that is true (and I don’t think it is), who cares? I’m interested in Truth, not faux democratic “truth,” manufactured by people who don’t have the desire to do what’s right in and out of season.
“Your boy …”
You’re a sad man, sir.
I seem to have hit a nerve. Why do you care about contraception? Read Matthew 25, and focus on helping the poor. Why do you care so much about other people’s sex lives? Who are you to sit in judgement of other people?
Yes, your boy. I see a lot negative articles and comments about Pope Francis, but precious few about King Donald I. The right wing echo chamber is pathetic.
Why won’t you provide actual answers to his questions though? Why do you run away and hide behind the weakest non-answers? What are you afraid of?
“How does not accepting the ban on contraception make me a sycophant? A Sycophant of who?”
Mr. Olson simply asked a question based on your assertion that Mr. Vance is a sycophant of President Trump. He in no way stated or implied that you were such. Yet you chose to make it about you. Telling.
“By the way, 90+% of the laity and many Priests agree with me.”
Agree with you on what? And you worded your assertion as if this group of people came to hold this view as a result of you having it. Again, telling.
“I seem to have hit a nerve.”
See a pattern yet?
“Why do you care about contraception? Read Matthew 25, and focus on helping the poor. Why do you care so much about other people’s sex lives? Who are you to sit in judgement of other people?”
I suspect you care quite a bit about the sex lives of people who engage in sex with underage children. Or who engage in coercive sex with other adults. So yes, there are situations where we SHOULD care about other people’s sex lives. Of course, people are free – though in grave error – to engage in contraceptive sex if they so choose. But they also have a right to know the truth about contraception and, indeed, about God’s design for the sexual act. Not intending to speak for Mr. Olson, I believe this is closer to the direction he was intending to go, rather than the self-righteous and judgmental direction you chose to take the conversation.
“[Trump] is destroying the country to help the billionaires.”
Elon Musk’s net worth has dropped by tens of billions of dollars since Trump’s second inauguration. That’s “helping” him?
Musk’s net worth varies daily according to the stock market. The tax cuts proposed by President Trump will disproportionally benefit billionaires. Those tax cuts will be paid for by cuts to Medicaid and other programs that help the poor. Are you fine with that?
And you are repeating your DNC/TDS talking points. I guess you’re even.
Wonderful Sister Renée. Praying for all involved.
“We are in a sense our own parents, and we give birth to ourselves by our own free choice of what is good. Such a choice becomes possible for us when we have received God into ourselves and have become children of God, children of the Most High. On the other hand, if what the Apostle calls the ‘form of Christ’ has not been produced in us, we abort ourselves. The man of God must reach maturity.”
– Saint Gregory of Nyssa
As such, “if the ‘form of Christ’ has not been produced in us,” is it any wonder we abort others?
It would not surprise me if Vance consulted with his pastor and/or a Catholic doctor and was given the green light on IVF. Well, maybe not a green light, but a “this issue is up to the conscience of the couple in question” kind of light.
That has been my experience in dealing with clergy and Catholic doctors regarding contraception. They are not going to touch it. You can even try to tell them that the IUD is an abortifacient, but the push back will be considerable that it is not and does not. (I’ve had that conversation with both a priest and Catholic doctor and got eye-rolls)
IVF is likely worse–because now you have a couple desperate for a baby, and the Church historically has promoted big families.
I deeply appreciate where Sister is coming from–this information certainly needs to be out there–but getting to our politicians and trying to get them to embrace the Catholic Church teachings when our clergy and medical community do not do so seems not especially productive.
Just over 20 years ago, I was teaching at a university, and one of my female students came to me for advice (Heaven only knows why). She had come across her husband’s email exchange in which he was asking out another female student for a date, saying that he didn’t think his marriage would last much longer. The student wanted to know if she should confront her husband about this or if that would only make matters worse. I told her that I had no idea, but I would ask my priest for advice, and in the meantime she and her husband needed to find some marriage counselor (probably a clergyman of some sort) they could both trust.
This priest was new to the parish. Unlike the older priest who had just been forced into retirement, he neither dressed nor acted like a priest. When I asked him what advice I should give the student, he said I should first decide if I wanted to start an affair with her. It was not that he caught a whiff of this from me and wanted to warn me away from serious sin; on the contrary, he seemed to think this was an opportunity I should explore.
I found another parish with an orthodox priest.
So, yeah, there are priests out there who will give advice that is scandalous in the true sense of the word. That said, Vance is a smart guy. I don’t think the problem is that he doesn’t know what the Church teaches or what he should do. I’m concerned that he is instead willing to pay a very high price “for Wales”.
I’ve met plenty of very smart people who do not know the that the prohibition on contraception and IVF is, well, a prohibition. Most would think it was a old fashioned, traditional, pious religious practice.
My guess is Vance brought the issue up to his priest (it may have come up during RCIA, but I am doubting it. It did not come up when I went through RCIA) and was told it was completely up to his conscience.
At least one social psychology science study has shown that women understand other women better than men understand women. Is it conceivable you were taken in by this student? Were you a professor of marital relationships??
What led you to take your student’s issue to the extent that you would seek professional clerical advice on her behalf? Why not suggest to the student that you are her professor, not her confessor, not marriage counselor, not husband or brother, not errand boy or employee in a self-help referral center.
The priest may well have read you correctly.
Wow. You really want to assume the worst, don’t you? Maybe because that’s what you would have done? After all, if you merely wanted to cast doubt on my story, the natural thing to question is if I have ever taught a university class. But no, you WANT to believe a juicier story. That speaks only about you and what you choose to imagine. If you had any shame, you would not want to make that public.
“ever”, not “every”
An additional scandal that this causes is that because so many priests give bad advice, and sometimes very obviously bad advice, an awful lot of people are not willing to go to them for advice at all, as a protective measure. They therefore try to sort things out by themselves (which may or may not work) or by asking people who are not priests (because at least the lack of authority makes it easier to ignore the advice).
“Sheep these are without a shepherd.”
I’m glad you were able to find a good parish.
Since the family—established from eternity upon the indissoluble union of a man and a woman—is the primary locus of faith’s transmission, a true domestic church, I’d double down on my favorite talking point, insisting that it is no surprise why the devil seeks to destroy it. His assaults are only intensifying—through a culture that has enshrined divorce, abortion, IVF, same-sex unions, and euthanasia into law—to achieve this aim, which the late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra aptly described as an act of ‘anti-creation.
As Sister Lucia of Fatima foretold in a handwritten letter to Caffarra around 1983–84: “Father, a time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family. And those who work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation. But there is no need to fear, for Our Lady has already crushed their heads.”
So, what’s the antidote to this Culture of Death?
Catholicism. Catholicism holds sacred the value of each innocent life.
Catholics must fight against this Culture of Death. A culture that treats unborn children as preferences, or means, and the sick and dying as burdens.
We must continue to lobby, protest and campaign to end a Culture of Death that preys on the most vulnerable.
But mostly, we must pray, we cannot, we must not, and we will not stop praying—not just with humility, but with relentless, almost stubborn insistence, more than with mere gentleness, I’d say.
the younger priest never passed the class about at least Trying to avoid the near occasion of sin?
J. D. (John Donald Vance) has shown he will do anything his vial master Donald John Trump asks of him, a true sycophant. A supposed recent catechist, he may have skipped some chapters. Moreover, Vance has stained his soul by his total ignorance of Trump’s prolific lies. IVF to be continued. Much more important…
Vance’s performance at the “Summit” of Trump and Velenskyy on Feb 28. proved the cruelty of his and Trump’s affinity to a mass-murderous war criminal dictator, Putin, who killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians over the 3 year war that continues today. It has been reported that Putin destroyed Ukraine’s electrical grid in the freezing winter. 26 countries have expressed their support for Ukraine.
We must pray for WORLD peace.
Goodness. I’m going to practice finding an easier way to copy and paste the section of the Catechism concerning calumny and detraction…
Understanding the scale of the war in Europe is impossible without a deep grasp of the Russian worldview. To shed light on this, I’ve consulted an expert and examined an extensive interview with Father Dmitrij Vasilenkov, head of the Orthodox chaplains on the frontlines of the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. A protoierej and knight of three Orders of Audacity, Father Dmitrij spoke to Russia’s state agency RIA Novosti on Defender of the Fatherland Day, boasting of the 42,000 soldiers baptized at the front.
On the eve of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, many anticipated a grand proclamation of victory from Vladimir Putin—perhaps even as a signal that the war was drawing to a close. Instead, the Russian military escalated its bombardment, raining down an even greater number of drones and missiles on Ukrainian territory. The message was clear: Russia’s goal remains conquest, with no room for negotiation. Any proposed partition plan—especially one brokered with Donald Trump, whose potential return to the White House is viewed as a boon for Putin—remains secondary to the Kremlin’s broader vision of “oligarchic sovereignty.”
Meanwhile, talk of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals appears less about post-war reconstruction and more about the broader technological rivalry between the U.S. and China. Russia, knowing it lacks the industrial and technological strength of either superpower, maneuvers ambiguously between them, seeking to extract advantage wherever possible. In this context, the so-called “peace negotiations” are designed to be interminable—sustained through cycles of temporary ceasefires and limited agreements—so that Russia can continue to reap the strategic and ideological benefits of a permanent state of war. After all, for the Kremlin, war is not just a geopolitical instrument; it is a theological doctrine. Victory itself is the ultimate sacred cause, demanding every sacrifice.
This ideology was on full display on February 23, Defender of the Fatherland Day—a Soviet-era holiday originally meant to commemorate victory in the Great Patriotic War but traditionally observed as a kind of “Men’s Day” ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8. Under Putin, however, the holiday has taken on an aura of solemn warlike sanctity. In a ceremony at the Kremlin, the Russian president awarded honors to eleven Heroes of Russia, proclaiming: “We fight for the Fatherland, doing everything possible to pass it on to our children and grandchildren, because this is the destiny that God has set for us. He has placed upon our shoulders a difficult but glorious mission—to defend Russia.”
“It pleased God”—*ugodno Bogu*—to send hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers to their deaths and to slaughter untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians, Putin told war veterans, urging them to remain faithful to the “radiant precepts” of their forefathers. “By demonstrating your courage, you stand as sentinels of Russia, fighting fervently for truth and justice, for peace and the future of our people.” To reinforce this message, the Russian leader invoked an unspecified 19th-century imperial war, recalling how soldiers at the Danube front had been ordered to charge “toward certain death, known in military tradition as the highest honor.” Earlier in the ceremony, Putin had quoted 18th-century Russian-German field marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, who, after a victory over the Turks in 1739, famously remarked: “Russia is ruled directly by God—otherwise, its very existence would be inexplicable.”
For the Kremlin’s ideologues, the ongoing war is woven into a grand historical-religious narrative. Orthodox military chaplains, like Father Dmitrij, frame it as the latest chapter in the “Path of the Archstrategos,” a late-medieval text that supposedly traces the origins of Kievan Rus’. According to this doctrine, the first Russians, before their conversion, fought in a barbaric and disorganized manner. Only with Orthodoxy did they discover the true meaning of life and war—learning that victory is both a battlefield necessity and a spiritual calling. Today’s Russian soldiers, they argue, must be similarly “educated to fight in order to be victorious,” both in body and in soul.
This fusion of war and faith finds its ultimate expression in the figure of Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, the legendary 18th-century Russian commander whom Patriarch Kirill is preparing to canonize as a saint. Suvorov’s words, immortalized in Russian military tradition, are now invoked as a moral imperative: “God does not help bandits. But the Russian soldier is no bandit.”
In this worldview, war is not a necessary evil—it is the highest expression of Russia’s destiny. And so, for Putin’s Russia, the war must go on.
morganD: There’s a great deal of difference between “vial” and “vile.” You might consult a dictionary (there are ones available online if you don’t own a hard copy).
Or, perhaps, since the topic is IVF, yours was a slip of the tongue mistakrnly confusing “vial” with a Petri dish.
Sister Renee states that “Biomarkers of the underlying causes of her infertility surface on the chart” but does not mention that the charting must be done by the infertile woman several times a day (recommended: each time she urinates) by checking her nearly-impossible-to-distinguish “markers” such as the consistency of her cervical mucus. This is not a realistic way for a working woman to spend her day, especially when she doesn’t see the sense of it.
I remember seeing an NFP chart used in India about 40 years ago that simply showed photo examples of the physical stages of what you describe throughout ovulation and the period preceding and following that. Illiterate
Indian women were able to follow it quite easily.
I shared the chart with a friend who was having difficulty conceiving a child and her daughter was the result.
Getting a person to “see the sense of it” is always the first step. That’s the foundation of the “why”. If someone has a “why”, the person can tolerate and be willing to follow through on a difficult “how”.
The responsibility to know, teach and defend the “ why” is on you and me. The responsibility to develop, teach and evolve the “how” is the responsibility of dedicated volunteers and professionals who themselves have a strong understanding and acceptance of the “why”.
We must know different working women!
Creighton charting takes a few minutes a day, is easy
To find a Creighton NFP teacher: https://creightonmodel.com/teacherlocation/
To find a medical professional: https://www.fertilitycare.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CFCMC-Collaborating-MC-list-for-website-Updated-Feb-17-2025.pdf