All-Natural Birth Control For New Moms
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Choosing birth control is hard. And for new moms, especially breastfeeding moms, it’s even harder. With all the warnings in the news lately, it makes moms wonder what’s the best choice for them.
A growing number of mothers are turning to an all-natural method, called Natural Family Planning, or NFP.
If you charted when you were trying to conceive, you already know how to do it. The same charting methods of tracking your basal body temperature, and especially cervical fluid, are used to determine when you ovulate, and around ovulation, you abstain, or use a barrier method.
The premise is, there are only a couple of days during your cycle when you can get pregnant. You ovulate once in a cycle, and the egg lives at most 2 days. Before you ovulate, and after the egg has gone, then you cannot get pregnant.
This method has some wonderful advantages. It’s almost free, it needs nothing more than pen and paper, an optional thermometer, and a couple of moments of your time a day. It’s very eco-friendly - no pill packets, and no peeing out synthetic hormones and turning all the local fish into 3 eyed hermaphrodites (kidding). There’s no medication so it’s very compatible with breastfeeding. It’s also compatible with faiths that disapprove of birth control. There’s nothing to interfere with lovemaking when you are not ovulating, and many couples feel that the advantages outweighs having to abstain or use condoms for a couple of days mid-cycle.
Disadvantages are that the method takes some time to learn. You really need to understand the principle if it’s to work, and you will probably have to chart several cycles before you’ll feel confident you won’t get pregnant. It took me several cycles to start understanding my chart, but now it takes literally seconds a day. You’ll also need the discipline to chart every day - but it’s barely any more work than popping a pill.
I use this method because I don’t want any more artificial hormones, foreign object or implants in my body. A bonus for me is that I now have a greater understanding of what my body is doing every cycle, and it’s pretty awesome what your body actually does! Another neat advantage is that once we decide to try for No. 2, we’ll know exactly what day to go for it!
My bible of Natural Family Planning, which explains everything you need to know (and also a must read for anyone trying to conceive, women with questions about their cycles, and just about anyone with a womb) is a book called Taking Charge of your Fertility, by Toni Weschler.
It’s everything you’ll need to know about NFP, and a must read if you are interested in following this method. There were several places in this book where I exclaimed - so that’s why that happens! Or that’s why I feel like that! I highly recommend it.
Sheila Kippley says...
All anyone needs to know about NFP, including the Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding, can be learned at http://www.nfpandmore.org by downloading the free, short, easy-to-understand NFP manual (84 pages). Sheila Kippley, volunteer for NFP International