Understanding Fertility Charting

Hop into the drivers seat and take control of your fertility. Natural family planing, allows you to finally understand exactly what is going on with your menstrual cycle and ovulation, and then use this knowledge to power your hormone free, completely natural and effective method of birth control. Best of all, fertility charting will easily morph into an irreplaceable ally when you are ready to become pregnant.

Some Basic Science

Once a month, your fallopian tubes release an egg that is capable of being fertilized and becoming a pregnancy. However, that egg is only capable of being fertilized for about one day. After that, the egg is no longer viable. Sperm, however, can live inside a women for up to five days.

What is commonly referred to as the fertility window is this combined amount of time. It is the about 24 hours that an egg can live, plus the five days sperm can live already released inside your body.

The length of the monthly cycle varies upon each woman individually.   By charting the length of your cycle and the day of ovulation, you are able to create a pattern that displays when you’re likely to become fertile in the coming months.

Planning Around Your Fertility Window 

Essentially, fertility awareness comes down to knowing your unique body and making fertility-based decisions about when to plan for or avoid intimacy, depending on your goal.  To avoid pregnancy, you have to understand the difference between your non-fertile ‘safe days’ and your highly fertile ‘risk days’.On your safe days, you can have sex with out protection, and you will not become pregnant because you do not have an egg ready and waiting to be fertilized. On your risk days, when you are fertile, you decide wether to abstain from sex all together or use an alternative form of contraception.

Use the same knowledge when planning a pregnancy to time your intimacy around your fertile days. Chances are you will be much more successful in achieving a desired pregnancy! 

Methods and Indicators

Very few women ovulate regularly on the much-vaunted 14th day of the cycle. The female cycle and therefore the moment of ovulation are subject to numerous influencing factors, which means that ovulation is fundamentally unpredictable by simply counting the days of the month.

Sexual intercourse shortly before ovulation is the most promising time to bring about pregnancy.

There are a number of different methods which enable you to determine when you are ovulating.  These methods include: 

• observing your Basal Body Temperature (BBT) as well as changes in cervical mucus or cervix.  This combined method is known as the symptothermal method and is known to be the most reliable out of all the other methods of natural family planning. 
• observing subtle changes in Basal Body Temperature (BBT)
• observing changes in hormone levels with the aid of ovulation tests
• observing cervical mucus
• observing cervical position





Bringing It All Together 

A combination of some or all of these observations can be used to chart your cycle and calculate ovulation. Once you know your ovulation date, all you have to do is identify your fertility window to plan or avoid a pregnancy. Check out Cyclotest, a simple, highly accurate device,  which combines a number of the different methods to establish your unique fertility window. 

Read original article at: http://ethicalfamilyplanning.com/understanding-fertility-charting