Family Planning Post #5: Natural Family Planning, Fertility Awareness, Sympto-Thermal Methods

In an effort to provide you with more specific information regarding family planning methods available, I am going to try to address them more individually. So here goes...

Natural Family Planning, Fertility Awareness Method, Sympto-Thermal Method

Basically, all three titles above are used in reference to the same thing--a method of noticing and keeping track of various signs your body provides to demonstrate whether or not you're fertile. In general, there are three things to check:

• your basal body temperature (your temperature early in the morning before any activity or other things have had a chance to impact your system)
• the amount of cervical fluid/mucus that your body is producing (this is generally checked externally and internally)
• the height, softness, opening, and wetness of your cervix (this is checked internally)

When you are experiencing signs of greater fertility, you basically either abstain from intercourse or you use another method (realizing that the other method may or may not be as effective as abstaining. and you have to be careful about the other method you choose). When done properly and if you abstain during your most fertile time, this method has the same effectiveness as something like the pill (greater than 99%).

The advantages (when additional methods are not introduced) include:

• 100% medical safety
• no physical side effects
• no requirement of surgery, chemicals, drugs, or mechanical devices
• complete reversibility
• no cost
• increased ability to detect other problems if your cycle is abnormal (i.e. nutritional deficiencies, cysts, cancer, etc.)
• increased awareness of when to try to get pregnant if you end up having difficulty, as well as an opportunity to detect the problem and find remedies
• increased communication between husband and wife

Possibile disadvantages include:

• difficulty in abstaining during the fertile time, especially since this is the time that the female is generally most interested in intimacy
• difficulty in reading the signs if your body is not giving super-clear indications
• since most medical schools don't educate their doctors and nurses well in this area, you may have difficulty finding a medical doctor near you who can help if your body is doing weird stuff (one way to take care of this if there really is no one in your community is to sign up for a Couple to Couple League class, because with the membership comes a year of free medical advice from their staff of doctors if you have trouble understanding your charts or what your body is doing)

Further reading/research opportunities:

• Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement, and Reproductive Health by Toni Weschler. This is a great book to start with, and it will probably provide enough information for most couples. Keep in mind that she is not writing from a Christian perspective... which in my mind is helpful, because she is very quick to remind us of the health risks of many of the methods we're so apt to use because of their immediate convenience. I see this kind of book as a common grace to people who would not otherwise be motivated by things of the Lord. I would just suggest that you never recommend the book to a friend without also pointing out that you don't agree with MANY of her statements and conclusions. For example, at the back of the book, she refers to the morning after pill as a form of emergency contraception and gives a reference to where to get it. She also regularly refers to your "partner" as opposed to "husband" throughout the book. Basically, she doesn't focus on any moral issue other than the fact that the female is the one who has to inject her body with stuff while the male does nothing--women's rights stuff. Despite these problems, I still think the book is very helpful for many reasons, including the fact that it actually shows color photos of the various types of cervical fluid so you can determine what they actually mean when they use terms to describe it.
• The Couple to Couple League (a ministry of the Catholic Church) offers classes all over the country as well as loads of resources regarding Natural Family Planning. (NOTE: Keep in mind that the Catholic Church has a fundamentally different view of the purpose of sex in marriage than most Evangelical Christians in that the Catholic Church teaches that EVERY act of sexual intercourse must be EQUALLY open to the gift of children, whereas most Evangelicals would argue that every MARRIAGE should be open to the gift of children but that it's not necessarily true that every act of INTERCOURSE be equally open to the gift of children (that's when you test your motives). Basically, the Catholic Church teaches that if you think you have a valid reason for preventing pregnancy, then you shouldn't have sex at all while you're fertile. We'll get to that more later, but I just wanted to point out that, while I think the Catholic Church offers a TON of helpful information and help to us, I don't fundamentally agree with everything they say.)
• The Art of Natural Family Planning by John and Sheila Kippley. This a book published by the Couple to Couple League and was the text for the class Chet and I took at the Catholic Church. My cycles tended to be a bit strange, and this book offers a bit more detail about how to read weird cycles than Taking Charge of Your Fertility offered.
• Fertility, Nutrition and Cycles by Marilyn Shannon is a great book to help you figure out how to naturally remedy some of the weirdness if your cycle is abnormal or if your signs aren't as clear as you need them to be. She makes a lot of helpful dietary suggestions and focuses in general on lifestyle choices (i.e. if your body produces very little mucus, she recommends adding a good fish or flax oil supplement to your diet so that you produce enough fluid to make it easier to determine when you're fertile). Further, if you have problems with your actual menstrual cycles, PMS, or other issues, she offers some helpful dietary suggestions.
• Your BIBLE is always something you should keep beside your other reading materials, making sure that you are testing things against the Word of God.