De Pere’s St. Gianna Clinic Practices Restorative Reproductive Medicine
By St. Gianna Clinic Medical Staff | Special To The Compass | October 12, 2023
Four Clinic Doctors Serve Community, Offer Fertility Care
De Pere — Many choose the St. Gianna Clinic because its approach to medicine — holistic, loving, affirming, authentically Catholic — extends to how couples are helped to overcome infertility challenges and provided with care throughout their pregnancies and beyond.
One of the most devastating crosses to bear as a couple is infertility. At St. Gianna Clinic, we seek to ease this burden by practicing restorative reproductive medicine. As the term implies, we seek to restore the reproductive system to its proper biological function.
We employ NaProTECHNOLOGY, which was developed at the St. Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Neb., to help couples achieve pregnancy. Though NaPro’s comprehensive treatments are medical and surgical, the backbone of restorative reproductive medicine is fertility awareness, which works with women’s menstrual cycles and seeks to identify and correct the underlying causes of infertility and reproductive dysfunction.
NaProTECHNOLOGY is much different than other approaches to infertility, such as intrauterine insemination (IUI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF). In addition to not resolving the underlying factors associated with infertility, these approaches remove the intimacy within the marital act of procreation. IUI and IVF occur in the clinical setting — a stark contrast to the joyful acts of love between married couples that God intended to be the root of procreation.
According to Dr. Madeleine Guevara, NaProTECHNOLOGY is the path to cherishing life.
“I realized,” she said, “that common prescriptions/treatments weren’t comprehensive in addressing the underlying issues and were actually leaving women with physical and spiritual band-aids that were (maybe) solving an issue in the short term, but leaving the person still unwell for the long term.”
Using restorative reproductive practices also leads to success. NaPro-TECHNOLOGY claims a pregnancy success rate of up to 80%. And NaPro-TECHNOLOGY does not just address infertility; this fruitful and rewarding approach addresses many common female ailments such as hormonal imbalances, irregular menstrual cycles, menstrual cramps, ovarian cysts and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). These conditions are typically managed by birth control pills, which we generally do not prescribe due to their harmful side effects, Catholic ethical concerns, and the availability of safe, effective and life-affirming alternatives.
Our OB/GYN team recently expanded to include Dr. Thomas Reinardy, who has practiced medicine at Ascension Medical Group in Oshkosh since 1997. We now have two full-time physicians — Drs. Guevara and Reinardy — and two additional doctors providing occasional coverage: Dr. Charles Cassidy and Dr. Herbert Coussons.
This growth enables us to better fulfill our mission of providing exceptional health care to all people — men, women and children — of all faiths and cultures from conception to natural death. It provides more opportunities to facilitate fertility awareness-based family planning in order to help couples either achieve or avoid pregnancy. Furthermore, it allows us to help women in high risk and crisis pregnancies and strengthens our ability to overcome the challenges of practicing medicine according to conscience.
Visit St. Gianna Clinic at stgiannaclinic.com/ to learn more, or call (920)-605-3115.