The Curious Invisibility of Fertility Awareness among pro-life and pro-choice folk

I have a really massive amount to say about what is called Fertility Awareness, Natural Family Planning, Natural Birth Control, and a number of other names.

But what I am interested in right now is its invisibility. Basically there are three main methods– daily temperature only (thermal method), cervical mucus/fluid/discharge only (Billings method is the most popularised name for this one), and daily temperature plus cervical fluid (sympto-thermal, aka Fertility Awareness Method [FAM], popularised by Toni Wechsler in the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility).

All of these methods take a maximum of five minutes and a minimum of 20-30 seconds per day, and are cheap or free. Their reliability in preventing pregnancy rivals Depo-Provera’s effectiveness. These methods (particularly the cervical-only and sympto-thermal) can even be used to increase odds of pregnancy to around 80 percent, if one wants children.

There are no chemicals or synthetic hormones required or involved. There are no side effects from use of these methods, and again– cheap, quick, reliable.

The sympto-thermal and cervical-only methods can even be used successfully for birth control when women have irregular cycles (such as from coming off the Pill, or breastfeeding, or stress, or PCOS, etc).

These methods allow women past optimal babymaking age (i.e., over 35) to undergo fertility testing and treatments at the most accurate and viable times for their individual bodies.

So why is this not the primary discussion topic among pro-life and pro-choice activists? Why does the discussion revolve around surgical and chemical abortion, which is basically something that occurs because women have been told their bodies are unpredictable morasses of hormones and OMG YOU COULD CATCH PREGNANT AT ANY TIME WATCH OUT.

Most women don’t know that sperm only live for days on end for a few days per month in any woman’s cycle. They don’t know that you can’t get pregnant for about 3/4 of your cycle (if you have a 28 day cycle, you have a maximum of about seven days fertility– the rest of the time, all the sex in the world won’t knock you up.)

They don’t know why some women ‘just walk by a dude and get pregnant’ (shorter cycles and/or maximum amount of sperm-friendly fertile cervical fluid).

In this society women are so totally disconnected from the reality of their femaleness that menstruation (which is the BEGINNING of your cycle, not the start and end of it) is reduced to a nuisance to be covered up with drugs so that you can be– what? Not a man, but not really a woman in the physical senses, either.

Birth control pills work by cruelly telling your body it is pregnant. The ‘period’ is a withdrawal from drugs, not an ovulation. That is basically appalling.

I know that some pro-life types hate fertility awareness methods because they think noticing fertility signs is somehow ‘going against God’s will’, nevermind that God gave women these signs for, you know, a reason. Maybe so they wouldn’t constantly worry at any minute they could CATCH PREGNANT? So that maybe they would be able to know their bodies intimately enough to take charge of when and how they wanted children, if they wanted them?

On the pro-choice tip, there’s a lot of talk about how it’s hard to swipe your vaginal lips and glance briefly at some goo (you can even do it with a tissue, if you’re squeamish). Clearly going to a doctor and paying monthly for pills or shots or patches that have obvious and at the least irritating side effects is somehow ‘more independent’. Not sure how relying on the medical establishment that brought us DES daughters and thalidomide babies and tested those quasi-holy Pills on brown women before daring to advertise them to whitegirls is a sign of independence and bodily integrity.

My views on abortion have changed somewhat upon finding out about fertility awareness. I guess I will bust out with some of this here. I am angry that in other cultures, cultures I will have to track down and identify by name, the cervical fluid method has existed and been in successful use for a long, long time. I am angry that some ‘Christians’ are against these methods because they were made popular in America among Catholics first (as a more accurate response to the almost unusable Rhythm Method). I am angry that these same ‘Christians’ think that telling women how their bodies truly work and showing that even a woman with irregular cycles can still find patterns and healthy things going on with her body is dirty and weird and bad. God gave us this world to study and in studying it, appreciate and love all the more the glory of His creation, the wonders of it all.

I am amazed that fertility awareness has shown that even with a giant fibroid, I have actually been ovulating and having normal cycles during all those months I thought the fibroid was bleeding my fertility away. It wasn’t. I just didn’t know what was healthy and what wasn’t. And so many other women are the same– no idea what kinds of bleeding are normal and sometimes a sign of excess fertility.

I am angry at pro-choice women who have diverted bodily integrity arguments away from the starting point– the ovulatory (usually) cycle. Some of them don’t like fertility awareness methods because of the Catholic popularising (as far as American understanding of them goes). Others don’t think they work because since they don’t understand or know how our cycles work, they just assume it’s a BS method to ‘keep women barefoot and pregnant’.

I think abortion is still important, because even if every young girl was taught some of these methods first and every consensual-sex pregnancy was a wanted one, you would still have women getting pregnant due to rape, incest, or having a life-risking pregnancy. And you would still have women who claimed they didn’t want to be pregnant and did it anyway (these are the women who skip their pills and then blame the Pill for ‘not working’– a small set of all women using birth control, but still, an important one to keep in mind).

For so many women, abortion comes up because pregnancy itself is considered an ailment that you catch unexpectedly, and is just not preventable without the god Science and Its magic Pills. The idea that we can take control of our bodies before the sperm ever get to them is just not in play.

And this is just amazing and upsetting to me. I want pro-lifers and pro-choicers to answer for this. Why are both camps united against starting with the cycle of fertility and infertility itself and THEN having a discussion about what bodily integrities need to be considered after that point?

Fertility Awareness methods=cheap or free, easy to explain, adaptable to women working two or three jobs. A case of thermometers is way cheaper than a case of birth control pills. And the easiest to do method (cervical-only) is totally free and takes ten or twenty seconds per day, completely competitive with the argument that ‘popping a pill is easier’.

I know also that fertility awareness is associated with over-35 professional, upper-middle class white women, but the current biases of FAM training and books are really an entire other post. The information itself is reducible to a postcard or so of data that all women can immediately put to use. It’s not ‘too complex’ to learn at least the cervical-only method. Eggwhite or lotiony cervical fluid–fertile. Gummy or just vaginal moisture–not fertile. That’s the minimum.

I just am baffled, hurt and angry at how mainstream and feminist views of femaleness try to dissociate women from the workings of their bodies. This even extends to the shaving and douching stuff– we’re not supposed to be women, we’re supposed to be sex-positive female dolls. Dolls don’t bleed, so you take a pill to stop the bleeding. Dolls don’t have icky goo spill out of them, so you douche it away. And dolls don’t have cycles– so if you catch pregnancy, you go have a doctor-man clean it out.

I still prefer herbal abortifacient knowledge and advocacy because so many abortion doctors are male and will continue to be male and this goes completely unquestioned among pro-choice feminists. Why is ‘bodily integrity and sexual freedom’ so tied to getting pills and procedures from a fundamentally masculine establishment that already tells us we’re ‘broken men’? Why is feminism structured to reinforce that patriarchal belief by rejecting any least sign of femalehood that cannot be sexualised, or cultifying it without understanding (the menstrual-blood painter feminists come to mind here)?

I’m a woman of color. The medical establishment is not really my friend– they think of me as test-meat for white women. The vitamin D deficiences that have led to 75 percent or so of black American women having fibroids–only just recently (the last year or so) getting mentioned. And the medical establishment STILL wants to rip out OUR female organs when they would never dream of recommending castrations for male tumors at the same rates.

But I’m digressing just a bit. I hope fertility awareness becomes more common among Christian women and non-Christian women alike– it would be great if abortion could be reduced simply by honestly knowing when you were and were not fertile. Not a behavior change or slut-shaming, not a pill or surgical procedure, but just teaching women to understand why their bodies do what they do for them.

That’s all for now. And no, I don’t think we shouldn’t have medical science, for pity’s sake– but if we can start with non-invasive, 99 percent effective birth control FIRST, why not go the route of least harm?