Tag: Leah Libresco Sargeant

Read This, Not That: Better books than ASK YOUR HUSBAND

Perhaps you are interested in the topic of femininity: what it means, why it’s important, what the Catholic church teaches about it. You’ve heard of Stephanie Gordon’s new book on the topic, Ask Your Husband, and you see that it’s getting (mostly) glowing reviews on Amazon. 

But then you see that some of the more granular and scholarly reviews, like this one and this one, say that, while book claims to teach a boldly orthodox Catholic view on femininity, it actually misunderstands, distorts, and misrepresents Church teaching. And the book’s publisher, TAN, says it has submitted Ask Your Husband to a diocesan censor for review after publication, “to ensure that the content is in line with the faith,” but has not yet heard back from the censor. 

It’s an important topic, for sure. But maybe there are better books to read. 

What shall we read instead? I asked several well-read Catholic women for recommendations for a new feature I’m calling “Read This, Not That.”

Here’s what they suggested:

DANIELLE BEAN

Danielle is a writer, speaker, podcaster, and retreat leader, and the author of several books.

Danielle recommends:

The Church and the Culture War by Joyce Little

“Yes, it’s out of print, but you can find used copies, and Little does such a beautiful job of responding to the culture, and secular feminism in particular, with the gift of timeless truth and wisdom of the Church. She’s very smart, but the book is clear and accessible, even to average moms like me.”
 

Essays on Woman by Edith Stein

 
“Ahhh, such a saint for our times! Now HERE is the Catholic perspective on the expansive gift of femininity and motherhood presented in a way that will inspire and encourage women of all backgrounds and all walks of life.” 
 
 
 
SUSANNA SPENCER

Susanna Spencer has a Masters in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, is a writer and the theological editor for Blessed is She, a regular contributor to the National Catholic Register, and is a co-author of the children’s devotional book, Rise Up: Shining in Virtue. She lives with her philosophy professor husband and four children in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Susanna recommends:

A Call to a Deeper Love: The Family Correspondence of the Parents of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus by Saints Zélie and Louis Martin

“This book of letters of canonized saints shows what a holy complementary marriage looks out lived out, with both working together to support the family through St. Zélie’s lace making business and the collaborative efforts they gave to help each other and their children grow in holiness.”

The Privilege of Being a Woman by Alice von Hildebrand

“The brilliant late Alice von Hildebrand (1923-2022) beautifully describes true complementarity of men and women, showing how it is a result of the curses of the Fall than some individual men have devalued women. She shows how women can both have equal dignity but also live out their call to live as full women of faith.”

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

“This book shows the importance of men and women treating each other as equals and working hard to maintain their love for each other. It shows the couples growth into faith in Christianity and the tension of giving themselves entirely to God but still to each other.”

Middlemarch by George Elliot

“Novels are great for understanding hard to grasp ideas about life. Middlemarch is classic tome which demonstrates in narrative form ways marriages can be lived out both poorly and well.”

 

ABIGAIL FAVALE

Abigail Favale is a writer and academic. She is the author of Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion and The Genesis of Gender.  

Abigail’s recommendations:

“For a more general resource that touches on a range of topics related to women and Catholicism, watch this free video series: Cultivating Catholic Feminism.

“This series responds to JPII’s call for a ‘new feminism’ and articulates what feminism could look like if truly and authentically Catholic. Full disclosure: I wrote the scripts, but the beautiful production quality and aesthetic is all the brainchild of Corynne Staresinc, founder of The Catholic Woman.”

“If you feel like reading—choose Edith Stein’s Essays on Woman.

“Edith Stein (a.k.a St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross) is a brilliant philosopher and a saint, and her writings on woman influenced JPII’s development of his theology of the body. Her take on woman and marriage is far more sophisticated and theologically rich than Gordon’s, while also remaining faithful to scripture and tradition.”

“Another book that comes at the question of woman from a totally different angle is The Eternal Woman, by Gertrud von le Fort.

“This book blew my mind when I first read it as a new convert. It is small but packed with rich spiritual insight, describing the beauty of the sacramental significance of woman—something that is unique to Catholicism, and completely overlooked in Gordon’s book.”

 

RACHEL LU

Rachel Lu is an Associate Editor at Law & Liberty, and a Contributing Writer at America Magazine. She lives with her husband and five sons in St Paul, MN.

Rachel’s recommendations:

“For a dignified, uplifting discussion of men and women and marriage, I like to browse Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love.

“Hildebrand is a personalist philosopher, not overflowing with practical advice, but the book has many insights to help us think about the complementarity of man and woman, and the sense in which we are meant for one another.”

“My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, offers an inspiring portrayal of maternal strength and honor, lived out on the American plains.

“We only see Antonia as a mother at the end of the book, but her fundamentally maternal character is evident throughout, and it is affirming to me to enjoy a book that is actually focused on the character of an admirable matron, and in showing how a girl can mature into that kind of woman. (Too often literary mothers are flat and uninteresting, mainly serving as support staff for more dynamic characters.)”

“St. Edith Stein’s Essays on Woman is full of rich material for reflecting on the nature of womanhood, and what it means to live as a rational being in a body made for childbearing.

“I’ll give advance warning that this is some heady philosophical stuff! You might not want to read it on a beach. It’s a treat though to see this topic addressed by a woman, who is also both a saint and a first-rate thinker.”

 

KATIE PREJEAN MCGRADY

Katie Prejean McGrady is an award winning author, speaker, and host of The Katie McGrady Show on The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM. She writes for Aleteia, Blessed is She, Catholic News Service, and hosts the Ave Explores podcast from Ave Maria Press. She lives in Louisiana with her husband and daughters.

Katie recommends: 

Three Secrets to Holiness in Marriage: A 33-Day Self-Guided Retreat for Catholic Couples by Dan and Amber DeMatte

“Found it to be accessible, not overly hard to implement, and relatable”

 
Couples, Awaken Your Love! by Robert Cardinal Sarah
 
 
“This collection of retreat reflections from Cardinal Sarah is challenging & the concepts provided a lot of great things to pray on.”
 
 
 

“A much better reflection on the feminine genius [than Ask Your Husband]”

 
 
“An actually realistic take on family life (from a WOH dad and a SAHM)”
 
 
LEAH LIBRESCO SARGEANT 

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. Her substack is Other Feminisms.

Leah recommends: 

Three to Get Married by Fulton Sheen
 
 

“My husband and I read this together, out loud, over the course of our engagement. It’s an excellent, accessible work on marriage and thus on men and women. And it’s always focused on how marriage is directed outward and upward to God—which helps avoid a certain kind of inward idolatry.”

 
 
 

“Favale is a convert to Catholicism who was formed first by fundamentalism, then by secular feminism. That means she’s particularly good at discussion where those cultures have ahold of a partial truth, but fall short of the fullness of truth to be found in the Church.”

 
Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyla 
 
 

“This one is the densest read, but the future Saint JPII is answering the hard question: We know marriage means giving up liberty in order to make a full gift of self. How do we make sure we are offering ourselves rightly? What makes marriage fruitful rather than self-erasure? (If I ask my husband, he would also recommend Wojtyla’s exploration of these questions in the play The Jeweler’s Shop, which is much shorter but differently challenging to read).”

 
Married Saints by Selden P. Delany
 
 

“This is our current family spiritual reading, so we’re not finished yet, but I appreciate having the example of many different saints, so we can remember that God calls everyone to sanctity but that there is more than one way to live out that command.”

 
Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset
 
 
 

“Why not explore these questions for more than 1000 pages in 14th century Norway? Hear me out, you guys. Undset makes an epic of one woman’s life to allow the small movements of the heart and the actions of grace to have the weight of a sprawling battle. My husband and I read it alongside a group of friends online, and it made for some of our most fruitful conversations about marriage, self-discipline, and self-gift.”

 
***
 
Many thanks to the contributors for their suggestions. I will admit I’ve never read Edith Stein, but it’s starting to feel like a must. 
 
What’s next for “Read This, Not That”? Can you suggest a popular book that tackles an important topic, but misses the mark? I’ll solicit alternatives from knowledgeable people, then share their suggestions. Send me an email at simchafisher@gmail.com with “read this, not that” in the subject heading, or use the contact form on this page. Thanks!
 
 
“Read this, not that” logo by Elisa Low of Door Number 9
 
 

A different NaPro story: Leah Libresco Sargeant speaks on loss and kindness

Last week, during Infertility Awareness Week, I published an interview with a woman who was served very poorly by her NaPro doctor. He failed her medically and caused her unnecessary physical and psychological harm. 
 
Leah Libresco Sargeant had a very different experience. Sargeant, 31, was married in 2016 and has one living child, Beatrice, who is 15 months old. Before Beatrice was born, Sargeant lost six babies. 
 

Those children are named Robin, Ariel, Blaise, Casey, Camillian, and Luca. Her third pregnancy was a possible ectopic, after which she began seeing a NaPro doctor. She then had a very early loss, sometimes referred to clinically as a ‘chemical pregnancy,’ and two more ectopic pregnancies before conceiving and carrying Beatrice to term. 

These are not dueling interviews, and they are not mirror images of each other. I wanted to share both women’s stories to give the conversation around NaPro more depth and nuance, because it’s so often presented in Catholic circles as a miracle cure, and entirely different from what mainstream fertility doctors can offer. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it  isn’t.

As Sargeant says,”Both stories are true. It’s a reason for people to hold Catholic doctors to a high standard of charity, as well as ethics. It’s not an unreachable standard.” 
 
Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity:
 
A lot of people lose their first babies. When did you become aware that what you were dealing with was out of the ordinary?
 
 With our first baby, Robin. I didn’t care if it was out of the ordinary or not. People would say things like, “Your odds are good if you try again,” but who cares? Our baby just died. Nobody would say that if your baby got hit by a car. For each of our pregnancies, we focused on the risk to this baby, rather than thinking of it on some abstract level. 
 
After Blaise [the third loss] it was only partly that we were looking for a NaPro doctor. We were looking for a doctor who was a kind person, which wasn’t how we felt about the two doctors we had seen before. It felt like they didn’t see our babies as babies. They barely saw us as people.
 

When we came in for the last ultrasound, we suspected we had lost the baby by that point, and right before [the doctor] came into the room, I heard her say, “Okay, so there’s nothing there?” And they were brusque with us when we were crying in the waiting room. I’m sure it’s uncomfortable for people to see that, but what did they think was going to happen? It felt as though they had never delivered the news of a miscarriage before. You’re surprised by this? 

Even if it didn’t make any improvement in our medical treatment, [having a Catholic doctor] would mean someone who would take our losses seriously. 

How did you go about finding such a person?

We were in New York City, and we were in a Frassati Group for young married and engaged couples, and they said Dr. Nolte and the Gianna Center was really good. 
 
She took a very exhaustive NaPro history with a dozen blood tests, testing every possible hormone. She also asked about all our miscarriages, and when she took notes, she wrote down the babies’ names in the charts. I spoke to her recently, and she wanted to make sure she had accurately transferred all their names. 
 

So it sounds like this is one of those geographical things. Elizabeth had to drive four hours to get to a NaPro doctor, but you had a choice. 

 

Yes,  just walked across town. It was a 30 minute walk, and there was a park nearby. 
 
How did you first hear of NaPro? 
 
I had heard about in general. I took it with a grain of salt, the same as with people who say NFP is the best possible thing for your marriage, and whatever problem you have, NFP will solve it. 
 

It’s hard to make really strong promises, because women’s health is so under-researched. It’s important not to overpromise, not because the science is unsound, but because women’s health is always under-researched. Progesterone may be helpful. Depending on [your underlying condition] ,some studies have found yes, some have found no. It depends on what the nature of the fertility problem is. It’s certainly plausible it could save the life of some babies, but it’s not a given.

We talked about the side effects of medications, and whether it’s worth the chance to try it. I didn’t notice any side effects of taking progesterone, so there was very little down side of taking it. It might help, and it wasn’t difficult to take it. She said we could always come back and discuss how it was progressing. 

The thing that was most difficult was that it was a lot of different pills to take. It was depressing taking a little pill canister around, taking things at every meal, and having that be a reminder of how hard this was for us. 
 
Did you ever sit down and discuss what the parameters would be, how far you would go, what you would try? 
 
It would  have been something we would have evaluated if we had been [pursuing treatment] over a longer period of time. But we did keep getting pregnant. It was, “Is this baby going to make it?” It wasn’t this long, undifferentiated slog. 
 
You mentioned in an interview that, pre-conversion, you found some appeal in the gnostic idea that the “real you” is housed in the body; and in another essay that NFP did some work to heal that. I wonder if having struggles with your body not “functioning” right awoke that struggle at all. 
 
It’s been a long and continuing conversion of heart. There’s a difference between teaching women that their cycle has a structure, versus teaching as though there is no cycle, there’s just periods, and it’s a problem, and here’s how to manage it. That bodies are basically bad, but you can stay ahead of them if you work hard.  [Although, with some situations with NFP,] it can feel like your body is sending you signals from a distance, and it’s foggy. It’s not as though NFP is a magic bullet. 
 
A lot of women struggling with fertility problems talk about feeling like their bodies are broken, or that they betrayed them. 
 
I didn’t feel that way. Although a lot of medical terminology pushes in that direction. “Miscarried” sounds like you were carrying the baby, but you screwed up. “Losing the baby” makes you feel like, “Did I take my eye off the baby? Somehow I lost him.” A lot of language circles around blame. I didn’t have this [particular] problem, but “incompetent cervix” [is another example]. It’s not like you personally went cervix shopping and picked out one with a bad expiration date. 
 
A lot of medical language ticks me off. It sounds like it’s a woman’s fault. [My doctor wrote on my chart] “early loss,” rather than “chemical pregnancy.” Part of what happened was I felt like my body was doing the best job it could.
 

It was personally comforting for me [that I didn’t have to have a DNC]. I got take care of my baby till the end. It could be in my family without involving aggressive medical attention. 

With Camillian, it was an ectopic pregnancy. The blood tests started getting bad, and when we went in for the ultrasound, we were steeling ourselves to hear that the baby had died. But we got told the baby was in the wrong spot and had probably already died, based on the lack of heartbeat and how far along we should be. That really changed things. We were in the doctor’s office in New York, and they said, “You need to go to the hospital.” We took a train to New Jersey [so as to avoid] a surgeon who had been unkind to us. 
 
It was one thing to lose the baby, and for the baby to leave on their own time, but the idea that they were going to take the baby really upset me. The sense of peace I had with the other babies, I couldn’t feel with Camillian. It didn’t feel like it was happening on God’s time table or on the baby’s time table. 
 
Dr. Beiter had just met us. He hadn’t know us before. But he also stopped and talked through all our options. It was a Catholic hospital. Because the baby had already died, we had more options than is sometimes the case. We wanted to know how can we take care of the baby, even if the baby has died?
 

We didn’t like methotrexate very much as an idea. It would have been licit, but I didn’t like the idea of dissolving the baby. You have to wait longer, and it doesn’t always work. 

[The doctor said,] “You could avoid surgery; isn’t that better? You can go home today, and possibly just be done.” We talked it through, and he definitely had a preference for the drug, but he talked through what we preferred. Both options were morally fine and medically effective, and we made the call, and he took good care of us. 

Surgery is a harder recovery. It was locking in a harder recovery, but we wouldn’t expect to go back for another treatment. [With methotrexate, the symptoms of the drug can be similar to those of a tubal rupture, so you may have to go back to the ER.] I just wanted to go home and be done with everything, even if I’m recovering from abdominal surgery.  
 

That’s a tough thing with not just fertility medicine, but with medicine generally. Sometimes things are black and white, but sometimes there are different degrees of benefit and side effects, and there isn’t a single right decision. 

Did you ever receive any specific medical treatment from NaPro doctors that a mainstream fertility doctor would never have offered?

 

It’s hard to know for sure. Some mainstream doctors won’t consider progesterone at all, but my original doctor tested and had me supplement. There were tests that a doctor might have done later that our NaPro doctor didn’t need to wait for many many losses to do. None of them came through, but if I’d had a clotting disorder, I would have been very grateful for her being up to check.

The big (evidence not fully in) treatments we had were metformin for PCOS, and antibiotics for endometritis (which is different from endometriosis). Both of which, from my review of the literature, don’t have enough evidence behind them to make them an obvious right choice. But they have plausible mechanisms of action and (for me) mild to no side effects.

Did you ever have to deal with Catholics judging you for family size or for not having a honeymoon baby? 
 
We’ve been pretty open about our losses. Anyone who knew us enough to ask would know. Sometimes strangers will see Beatrice and say, “Is she your first?” I usually say “She’s our first to make it to birth.” Just because it’s true. 
 
Despite your good experience with Catholic doctors, is there anything you would like to see changed about the culture around NaPro or the conversation around Catholic fertility issues in general?
 

It’s good to remember that there’s not necessarily anything there to be fixed. [Sometimes people speak] in terms of something secretly wrong with you, and NaPro can fix it. We still don’t know for sure. We really don’t know if there was an underlying problem, or if we were just unlucky. 

If you feel like every person’s story ends by finding and fixing a problem, you can get emotionally blackmailed, by yourself, even. “I must have a really secret, obscure problem!” I saw that a bit in the miscarriage support group I was in. For the most part, it was really helpful, but [people would go to extreme lengths like] really aggressive elimination diets. I think people do that because they’ve tried everything, and it hasn’t happened, so they have to look harder for what’s wrong. 

God does make people who don’t have children, because that’s His really exhausting will for them, and not because His will is that they find and fix anything. It’s not comfortable, but it is true. That means people who do fertility care have to talk about the theology of suffering, not just aspirational fixing. 
 

One thing that helped me is that I have a friend who’s a Dominican sister who cares for people who are fatally ill with cancer. That’s their charism: They care for indigent people who cancer who wouldn’t otherwise have anyone to care for them. Not to cure them, but to care for them. That’s what my job was as a mother. 

Can you say more about that?
 
Some moms get to take care of their babies for the mom’s whole life. That’s not what I got to do. Instead, I got to take care of them for their whole lives. 

To care for them without the hope of curing them: That could be my work as a mother. 

Hopefully it’s because He trusts me with them. “I’m going to give you this baby who’s going to die. I’m entrusting you to love this baby in the way that baby needs to be loved, not the way you want to love that baby.”
 
And I worried, what if I get really good at this and God only wants me to do that? 
 
Is there anything we didn’t cover that you’d like people to know about your experience, or about infertility in general?
 
Sometimes people weren’t sure what to say to us. Trying to get us not to be sad is a lousy approach, but a common one. They didn’t say “Don’t be sad” out loud, but that is what they were saying quietly. If you could say quietly “Don’t be sad” in front of what you’re going to say, don’t say it. It’s better if you could say “I’m sad, too” quietly. 
 
What I wanted to hear was, “I’m sorry I won’t get to meet your baby. I would have liked to meet your baby.” 
 
 
***
 
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of two books, Arriving At Amen and Building the Benedict Option, and she runs a Substack called Other Feminisms: Creating a culture that values interdependence over autonomy.