I won't speak for others, but I can tell you why I did. This is my story: Why I decided to use a natural family planning method.
I do not like drugs. I avoid them whenever I can. Just before getting married, I was introduced to the idea that I would need to take a pill everyday to avoid becoming pregnant. This idea did not excite me. But what other alternative was there?When I started on birth control, I actually started with the patch because it only required that I remember to change it once a week, not every day like the pill; less chance of "messing up." Within a few months however, I found that I did not like the patch. If I forgot to use it, for even one day, I was thrown for quite the emotional loop. I felt out of control, something that was not common for me. It felt horrible! I switched to the pill, and even though I had to take one every day, I did not experience the sudden swings like I had experienced on the patch. This pacified me for a few years.
But it kept bothering me, "If the patch could do that to me, what was the pill doing to me?" Occasionally I would research, looking for an alternative to the birth control pill, but each search left me looking at more pills, inserts, or implements.
What was wrong with all of these methods?
Most birth control methods use hormones to suppress the natural fertility cycle. I found several studies and heard people talk about how the use of these hormones affects the body. Things like how today's pills have lower levels of hormones because research has found that the higher level hormones of earlier pills 'may have caused cancer' and all sorts of problems. My thoughts were "What will they find out tomorrow about the pills of today?" Every drug has an adverse effect. They usually help and hurt your body in one way or another. Don't believe me? Look at the labels.
The point is: I did not want to be a guinea pig.
Nothing felt right. But what else could I do?
I looked into natural family planning methods.
Rhythm method, basal body temperature, ovulation charts, they all had one thing in common: Too much room for error.
Too much was left up to chance. Each natural family planning method seemed based on good principle but not complete. They required long periods of abstinence each month to "make sure" you would not get pregnant yet the chances of getting pregnant were still higher than just staying on the pill. Not good enough for me.
Then Came The Tipping Point
While at a doctor’s appointment my doctor shared some information with me about how today's contraceptives work, which he himself had just discovered. There are three ways today's contraceptives work to avoid a pregnancy. They all work the same way.
Here they are, short and not so sweet:
1. Stop the egg from ovulating
2. Stop the sperm from getting to the egg
3. Stop implantation of a pregnancy, thereby causing the body to abort the pregnancy, in case the first two don't work.I was floored! I had never heard such a thing! Could this be true?
It says so right on the label of the contraceptive, though you would be hard pressed to find, or recognize it.Here it is, right off of a label:
"Combination oral contraceptives act by suppression of gonadotropins. Although the primarymechanism of this action is inhibition of ovulation, other alterations include changes in the cervicalmucus (which increase the difficulty of sperm entry into the uterus) and the endometrium (whichreduce the likelihood of implantation)."
Does it sound the same?
That's probably why you missed it. I knew it was there, and yet I still had to scour the label 3-4 times before I could find it again. Click Here to read the label for yourself.
This was the tipping point. I was already uncomfortable with using the pill, having my own health in mind. Now that I knew the pill did not only prevent a possible pregnancy, but sometimes aborts a pregnancy that occurs "by mistake", I had a choice to make.The number of aborted pregnancies due to use of the pill is very small, but in my book, one is too many.
Now what do I do?
Thankfully my doctor had been researching this answer for me already. In light of this information he was preparing not to write prescriptions for contraceptives anymore. He wanted to provide a good natural family planning method alternative for birth control and he found a method called the Creighton Model. This was the method I had been looking for!
If you are interested in Natural Family Planning, this is the method that makes avoiding and achieving a pregnancy truly a matter of choice.
To learn how to practice natural contraception, have a look at Ethical Family Planning's page here.
