Fertility Awareness

A woman’s choice in birth control is an incredibly personal decision, with lots of factors to consider.

No one knows you or your body like you do. You don’t have to give away your decision about your body and your birth control of choice for what your doctor or your partner think you should use.

The Fertility Awareness Method is a natural form of birth control practiced by observing and recording our body’s fertility signs. This can be used to prevent pregnancy or plan a pregnancy naturally.

The benefits of learning about your own fertility include:

– Understanding that hormonal birth control isn’t the only option available — you have a choice.

– Being confident in your choice of birth control (whatever it may be).

– Introducing you to a natural option of birth control that works with your body – that possibly you didn’t know of.

I believe learning about fertility awareness is really about providing options to us as women. Options that we may not have known even existed.

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Fertility Awareness Method (or FAM for short) covers an umbrella of various methods. Some are taught in a religious context, or have religious values associated with them (Natural Family Planning). Others are taught in a secular, or non-religious context and are are based on observing and recording various fertility signs, including cervical fluid only (The Billings Method), basal body temperature only (The Temperature Method) or basal body temperature and cervical fluid (The Sympto-Thermal Method.)

For this course, we will be referring to the highly effective Sympto-Thermal Method of fertility awareness which is hormone-free, non-intrusive and has been found to be 99.4% effective when used correctly. Fertility awareness is natural, without any side effects, helps monitor reproductive health, allows for joint responsibility, aids in developing couples communication and is morally acceptable to all cultures.

A woman is not fertile for the entire length of her cycle. It is only possible to conceive during her “fertile window” several days surrounding the time of ovulation.

If a woman is using Fertility Awareness to avoid pregnancy, she can either abstain from vaginal intercourse or use a barrier method during her fertile window. Similarly, if she wishes to achieve pregnancy, the fertility signs indicate when conception is possible.

For women who are concerned about the health, emotional, and environmental impacts of hormonal and other forms of birth control, Fertility Awareness is a natural birth control method that is 99.4% effective when learned and practiced according to the method’s rules.

How much time does it take to learn the method? Shorter than you’d probably expect! The rules can seem a bit overwhelming in the beginning, but don’t worry, it doesn’t take long before you commit these rules to memory.

Before we dive into the material, one thing I do want to stress … when in doubt, don’t. You’ll need to consider yourself fertile until you can prove otherwise!

Worrying you might have had sex on a fertile day (and risking an unintended pregnancy) is not an effective use of the method. Most women need at least two or three cycles to chart their signals confidently and to correctly identify that their fertile window has opened. Being confident in your understanding of the rules is a necessary part of what makes fertility awareness effective.

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“It is unfortunate that the Fertility Awareness Method is even referred to as a method, because in reality, it should be seen as a fundamental life skill that all women should learn, just as they are now taught basic feminine hygiene.” – Toni Weschler, Author of Taking Charge of Your Fertility

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To chart your fertility signals, you’ll need a charting app (or paper charts included at the end of the book) where you can input your recordings daily. Once you get the hang of it, observing and charting your fertility signs takes about two minutes of daily attention.

I recommend the Read Your Body app available on the app store and the google play store.

Please note, there are various ‘tracking’ apps that can remind you when your next period is coming and offer predictions — these are not suitable for our case. You’ll want to make sure to select an app that doesn’t have a prediction feature or that can be turned off and used in manual mode.

Using an apps’ prediction may be ok if you’re trying to get pregnant, but it’s disastrous if you’ll be using fertility awareness as birth control. Instead, we’ll be interpreting a fertile and infertile window based on our day to day fertility signals which is what makes the fertility awareness method effective and reliable.

>> Action Step: Download a charting app or decide to use the provided paper charts at the end of the book.