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For the past several years, I have researched and spoken with Catholic women who reject the birth control pill in favor of Natural Family Planning (NFP). NFP is the Catholic-church-approved method of managing family size through tracking fertility cycles rather than using a contraceptive pill; this involves abstinence rather than condoms and adoption rather than IVF. Many might say that those who practice NFP are opposed to feminism since they promote fertility tracking in place of contraception access. Yet, the women in this Catholic subculture identify as feminists and view using NFP instead of the pill as a feminist act.

Cristina is one such young woman. When I interviewed her three years ago, she was in her early 20s and worked in fundraising for one of the handful of Catholic organizations founded in the wake of Humanae Vitae (the Vatican’s 1968 publication that re-asserted condemnation of the pill) to teach and promote NFP. Cristina was not married when I met her. And yet, she had been tracking her menstrual cycle for several years in preparation for future marriage. She explained that it is better for women to learn NFP when they are single because there is “less pressure” and “you can just learn your body” without worrying so much about pregnancy. She told me that NFP is “good for women,” because it teaches them how their bodies work.

NFP-practicing women are a minority among both women in the U.S. and American Catholic women—yet their presence has an outsized impact since bishops and the Catholic hierarchy support their positions. The number of women who practice NFP is hard to count: the Guttmacher Institute has found that almost 99% of U.S. Catholic women have been on the pill at some point in their lives. But many of the participants in my research, who now reject the pill, report having been on the pill as teenagers or early in their marriages. More than one hundred women were willing to let me interview them about their NFP practice, and I passively collected almost 500 survey results in less than six months. While the number of women who practice NFP appears to be small, these individuals comprise a powerful and well-networked subculture—one that is predominantly white and middle-class, with increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking and Latinx Catholics. They are well-educated recipients of college and graduate degrees. And they are Catholics who claim to be feminist even as they reject the pill and protest legal abortion.

Paula, a married mother of eight, in her 50s, is a long-time NFP teacher. She believes the feminist movement has hurt women. Before she learned about NFP, she had been on the pill because she wanted to make sure her career as an engineer was not derailed by children. She shook her head as she told me about her younger self and said that NFP is about “true femininity;” it gives women more options. Paula touched my elbow and said, “I just want you to know that NFP is true feminism.”

This is a counterintuitive claim. Feminism in the twenty-first century is defined by gender equality, especially through advocacy for access to contraception, abortion, and other reproductive healthcare. In the United States, some conservative Catholic women, most notably in the movements led by Phyllis Schlafly, have protested feminist goals like the Equal Rights Amendment and have advocated for women’s place in the home and in raising children. But within today’s NFP subculture, Catholic women are reclaiming and celebrating their feminism.

NFP’s feminism is deeply intertwined with both a political and personal rejection of birth control and abortion, which traditional Catholic teaching fully opposes. This was consistently evidenced in my conversations with NFP women and couples, including Cristina. As a college student, Cristina had been involved with “Students for Life,” a university-oriented arm of the pro-life movement. She explained, “I would say NFP [is part of] pro-life culture always because it changes your mindset towards what life is.” Cristina’s words reflect a broader sentiment—one that sees life beginning at conception, such that abortion and contraception are the same; both block the procreative purpose of sexual relationships.

This conflation of abortion and birth control is also apparent in how members of this subculture talk about their family. For example, when I pulled up to the house of an NFP-practicing couple I call Sally and Evan, I noticed their station wagon with a bumper sticker of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Over the past thirty years, the Virgin of Guadalupe has expanded from a symbol of Mexican identity to a marker of pro-life Catholic politics. Sally explained to me that her large family size (six children) has been about remembering that “the Lord is in charge—that has shaped my life…And this goes with being pro-life.” Marriage, Sally and Evan explained, is about being open to God’s plan for your life. And if that means six children, infertility, or caring for aging parents, then that is how your family is shaped. Couples like Sally and Evan describe a “pro-life mentality” in their family planning, which includes family trips to the local abortion clinic to pray and protest.

Many of these women, like Sally, Cristina, and Paula, describe themselves as feminists. In fact, they insist that NFP is more feminist than promoting access to contraception. Moreover, they believe that abortion and the birth control pill are not only anti-feminist, but unhealthy for women. Rather than liberating or empowering consumers, they maintain that contraception threatens women’s physical bodies. They insist that NFP is more concerned with protecting women’s health and is thus a true form of feminism.

Since “feminist” is a politically-loaded term, I initially wondered why these women were choosing a label that could be confusing. I soon discovered that this choice of words is strategic; the women I interviewed believe that their all-natural, health-focused, and pro-women approach will resonate in the broader culture.

Joanna, a young woman in her late 20s who has been teaching NFP for five years, told me that she first became interested in stopping pill-based birth control because it made her physically ill and emotionally depressed. Joanna is a self-described feminist who was initially uninterested in NFP because it struck her as opposed to her feminist ideals. A friend recommended the Toni Weschler’s classic text on fertility tracking, Taking Charge of your Fertility, a book well-known outside the NFP world by women who wish to avoid the pill or other forms of contraception. Joanna explained to me that, “I knew the Catholics weren’t okay with artificial birth control…And I was like…I don’t understand why. I think that’s not very feminist.” She had a close friend who was Catholic and Joanna asked her, “Hey, I’m struggling with this birth control issue thing, and what do you use? And so she told me about NFP. And as I started looking into it more, I actually…got really excited about it; like, oh, I’ve never learned this. This is so cool!”

In fact, the data is clear that more and more women—Catholic and not—are concerned about the long-term effects of hormonal birth control on their bodies and on the environment. A 2018 survey by Cosmopolitan of two thousand women in their 20s found that “seventy percent of women who have used the pill said they’d stopped taking it or thought about going off it in the past three years.” A 2018 commentary in the New York Post referenced this survey while highlighting the many apps and smart technology options for “fertility awareness methods” and the millennial women who are no longer interested in birth control pills. These articles suggest that shifting norms around birth control are not just Catholic.

Guidance for managing family size without the pill, offered by Toni Weschler and other fertility awareness resources, advise using condoms or diaphragms during fertile periods. The difference between this kind of family planning and NFP is what NFP practitioners call a “contraceptive mentality.” Ideologically, as Sally detailed it, NFP requires couples to have “openness to the Lord’s plan.” Practically, that openness is facilitated by choosing to not use condoms, nor to pull out, during women’s fertile periods. NFP expects couples to abstain from sex when the wife is not considered fertile, based on her tracking.

As Joanna learned more about fertility-tracking, she and her fiancé attended a class on NFP at their local parish. She studied the Catholic reasons for avoiding the pill and discovered a method of NFP called FEMM (Fertility Education & Medical Management), which is app-based and marketed toward younger Millennial and Gen-Z women. FEMM’s app is attractive and does not mention Catholic teaching anywhere in the interface, nor in its reports on efficacy, although it’s funding sources are Catholic and everyone I interviewed who is associated with FEMM is Catholic. Instead of promoting Catholic reasons to use NFP, FEMM focuses on women’s health and the value of fertility tracking for medical reasons. FEMM knows that Catholic women are not the only women who are deciding to stop the pill.

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This concern about the toll the birth control pill can take on women’s bodies is a theme within NFP-practicing Catholics. Kayla, a mother in her 30s with a history of infertility, was just one example of a woman who guffawed at the idea of the pill liberating women—she told me that it trapped women into ignoring what their body needs. Sounding like a twenty-first century echo of the renowned 1969 feminist collective, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, both Kayla and Joanna told me that “fertility is not an illness.” The pill, Kayla insisted, treats fertility like a medical problem. NFP, she said, treats fertility as a good thing for women, rather than something to be tamed by medicine. She smiled and told me that she works to broadcast the benefits of NFP on women’s bodies without sounding too much like a “Catholic weirdo.”

Catholic NFP supporters are careful to emphasize their feminism through a focus on women’s health. And they are able to claim this as “feminist” because the term is in flux. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of “evangelical feminists” in conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. On the other hand, the Gen Z women in my classrooms refuse the label, even if they agree with the political agenda of access to reproductive healthcare for women and queer people. As a result, the term is available for NFP women to define. That is what is happening when someone like Jane, a young woman in her 20s who practices NFP, celebrates being a feminist. Jane hosts a podcast, “Catholic Feminist,” where she has interviewed many NFP teachers. Several of the 20-something women I interviewed referenced learning how to articulate their feminist take on NFP from Jane’s podcast.

Jane consistently argues that practicing NFP is a feminist move. In her 2019 manifesto on Catholic feminism, Jane argues that being pro-life is being pro-woman. She insists that women need good healthcare, access to affordable childcare, and supportive social nets that make raising children possible. Feminists of another political bent would recognize her points and affirm her arguments. But Jane takes that same data to argue that the pill and abortion are not feminist because she interprets them as having negative health consequences for the women who choose them. She embraces an essentialist view of gender to argue that women’s ability to have children is something to celebrate.

These kinds of political moves by NFP-defined feminists are confusing because many of their concerns match those of feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood: they believe women should not have to bear the weight of child-rearing so unevenly. They support better prenatal care and free childcare. And, they claim that their solutions are feminist.

Of course, NFP-practicing women are also the products of the same feminism they reject. They are well-educated and middle-class women, who were often required to take a gender studies course during their undergraduate careers. The younger among them tend to have only one or two siblings, suggesting that their parents likely used some form of birth control. These women have access to money, education, and the language of feminism because they were formed by it.

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Throughout the five years I have been immersed in the NFP ecosystem, the insistence that NFP is feminist has been a persistent theme. When I report this insight beyond that subculture, I receive hard stares and dubious comments about The Handmaid’s Tale and Amy Coney Barrett’s big Catholic family. The fact that NFP-practicing and promoting women claim the feminist label seems jarring because of the contemporary political landscape.

This use of the label “feminism” raises important questions about the politics and political reach of the term. Pro-choice feminists insist that their agenda protects the rights and dignity of women through access to hormonal birth control options and safe abortions. Yet, my research is finding that pro-life feminists argue that restrictions on abortion and birth control are ways to support women’s dignity, health, and empowerment. They interpret the pill as bad for women’s bodies and denigrating to women’s relationships with men. And they view abortion as opposed to how women can flourish.

When I first began meeting with these women, they tended to interpret themselves and their community as an entrenched minority—but the contemporary political landscape has changed, and this subculture now has power and influence. This changed landscape demands our attention. These are the women who march every January at the annual March for Life. They give presentations at their parishes about the dangers of the pill. They run adoption agencies and campaign for robust post-natal support for women and babies. They are an un-ignorable part of today’s debate on contraception and abortion—and without understanding how they use the label feminism, we fail to understand the terms of the debate and what is at stake.

Katherine Dugan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Springfield College in western Massachusetts. She studies Catholicism in the U.S. and is at work on an ethnography of Catholics who practice NFP.