Happy Fertility Awareness Week! Wait. What?

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 27, 2026

As the month winds down, I’m sure my fellow Catholics are still basking in the afterglow of the week that was. After all, the fourth week of February began with February 22nd—and you know what that means! It’s Fertility Awareness Week in the Catholic Church!

Why, your parishes must have been overflowing with FA Week posters, bulletin inserts, liturgical prayers, articles, couples’ testimonies, Church teaching summaries, and resources for finding a fertility awareness class in person or online. Surely there were media kits with social-media graphics and web banners, parish toolkits for celebrating locally, maybe even special recognition of grandparents and large families.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Fertility Awareness Week?

That’s because I just made it up. There is no such thing in the Catholic Church. But there should be.

My Fertility Awareness Week fantasy is modeled on a real initiative: Natural Family Planning Awareness Week. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is a national educational campaign in which dioceses highlight Natural Family Planning methods and Church teaching on marriage and responsible parenthood. The week coincides with the anniversary of Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (July 25), which proclaims Catholic teaching about human sexuality, conjugal love, and responsible parenthood.

Granted, NFP Week is not as prominent as it could be. Still, the idea behind it is brilliant. The Church’s opposition to artificial contraception is one of her least popular teachings, widely ignored even among Catholics. Yet readers of Catholic Culture know that Paul VI proved prophetic. In Humanae Vitae, he warned that widespread acceptance of contraception would lead to marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, and the objectification of women. Decades later, those warnings seem less like speculation and more like sober prediction.

Whoever decided to highlight Natural Family Planning during the anniversary of Humanae Vitae did the Church a service. Even if the rest of the year your parish rarely mentions the Church’s countercultural sexual ethic—or that Catholicism offers the remedy for modern sexual confusion—late July at least provides a reminder.

As with Humanae Vitae and late July, so with Donum Vitae and late February.

In 1968, long before the social consequences were visible, Humanae Vitae foresaw the damage contraception would bring. Catholics rightly mention that foresight as evidence of the Church’s supernatural guidance.

Likewise, in 1987, Donum Vitae—issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger during the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II—warned that in vitro fertilization would also prove disastrous. The document argued that IVF violates the dignity of the human embryo by separating procreation from the marital act and undermining both the integrity of marriage and the rights of the child. The technique replaces rather than assists the conjugal act.

Most strikingly, Donum Vitae warned about what IVF would entail in practice: the routine creation of multiple embryos, the freezing of many, the discarding of others, and the exposure of still more to high risk of death. Even when not intentionally destroyed, embryos would be treated as biological material subject to selection and control.

That was 1987.

Today, the vast majority of embryos created through IVF are never born. Millions—perhaps tens of millions over the decades—have perished in the process. Often, more than 90 percent of embryos created in a cycle do not result in a live birth. In the United States alone, estimates suggest that roughly a million embryos remain frozen in storage, many indefinitely. This is what happens when human embryos are generated in laboratories: they become objects that can be screened, stored, discarded, or forgotten.

Exactly as Donum Vitae warned.

Like Humanae Vitae, Donum Vitae was prophetic. It anticipated not just an abstract theological problem but a concrete social reality: a technological system in which embryonic human beings are routinely created in excess, sorted, frozen, and destroyed. If Catholics view the Church’s foresight in 1968 as a sign of divine guidance, it is hard not to see a similar pattern in 1987.

Which brings us to this past week.

Instead of commemorating the anniversary of Donum Vitae with a renewed catechesis on the dignity of human life at its earliest stage, Catholics watched President Trump highlight IVF in his State of the Union address, touting a government program to make the procedure more accessible. As Reason Magazine put it, Trump’s choice to spotlight a woman undergoing IVF suggested that on this issue he is not inclined to yield to pro-life critics on his right.

There was already anxiety in Catholic circles over the participation of Trump and Vance in the March for Life, given the administration’s mixed record on protecting unborn life. I get it. But Reason’s framing was not wrong: IVF is politically popular. By wide margins, Americans support it. It is, in political terms, an 80/20 issue—and we are in the 20.

If Catholics want policymakers to reckon seriously with the fate of IVF-created embryos, the first task is not lobbying Congress. It is changing hearts and minds. The moral case has to be made patiently, pastorally, and repeatedly. People must first see that these embryos are not “excess tissue” but sons and daughters in their earliest stage of life.

That kind of cultural shift does not happen overnight. But it also does not happen at all without sustained effort.

It’s not too soon to start planning for Fertility Awareness Week 2027.