The Garden of Fertility: A Guide to Charting Your Fertility Signals to Prevent or Achieve Pregnancy- Naturally-and to Gauge Your Reproduction Health - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katie Singer’s books include The Wholeness of a Broken Heart, Honoring Our Cycles, Honoring Our Cycles in Africaand An Electronic Silent Spring.

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Introduction

IN JUNIOR-HIGH BIOLOGY ABOUT THIRTY years ago, I looked under the microscope my teacher offered and struggled to figure out how the stuff on the slide was relevant to me. I’d just begun to menstruate, and I wanted to know how my body worked. I wondered if other girls had strong cramps and what they did to ease them. I wondered if menstruating meant that if I had sex, I could get pregnant any day. Or was it just a few days each month? If it was just a few days, which days were they?

Once I became sexually active, I got a diaphragm and then a cervical cap. I asked a doctor and a midwife if they knew a way I could learn to tell when I was fertile. Each of them shook their heads.

A Tangle

Years later, my boyfriend and I drove toward a cabin out of town to celebrate my birthday. “I’ve got another yeast infection,” I said quietly.

“Well that’s lousy,” he said.

The lousiness wasn’t that I was sick, but that we wouldn’t be able to make love. Already that year I’d had several yeast infections because of irritation from the spermicide I used with my cervical cap.

How do I get out of here? I wondered. Out of feeling like my birthday celebration is only about sex, out of birth control that makes me sick?

Sex, fertility, love. Like the burning in my groin, they made a tangle too hot to touch.

Learning to Chart

Once I heard about Fertility Awareness (FA), also called Natural Family Planning (NFP), I decided to learn it. FA is based on a woman’s daily charting of her waking temperature and cervical fluid. With Fertility Awareness, a woman can tell when she’s fertile and infertile. To avoid pregnancy, couples postpone intercourse or use a barrier method on fertile days. To conceive, they know the best time to try.

Fertility Awareness is not the same as the (unreliable) Rhythm Method, which determines fertility by the patterns ofprevious cycles. FA gauges fertility as the woman’s daily chart evolves. According to numerous studies, when its rules are followed, Fertility Awareness is virtually as effective as the Pill.

Through books and classes about Fertility Awareness, I finally learned the vocabulary of my menstrual cycle, the functions of different hormones, and how to determine when I am fertile and infertile. As I started to observe and record my fertility signals, I began to experience explosions of awe: I had never conceived or tried to, but from charting I could see bona fide proof of my fertility. My cycles had often been erratic, and now (from knowing when I ovulated), I could predict when my period would come. I was with a new man while I learned the method, and his interest in the method helped both of us appreciate my femaleness.

Brooke, my partner, realized that ever since he was a teenager, he’d woken every morning and asked, When was the last time I had intercourse? And, Do I feel like masturbating? (Based on surveys of men who’ve taken my classes, this is a pretty typical way for a man to start his day.) Once I started charting, Brooke had a new waking question: Is Katie fertile? (Other men report wondering, What’s my partner’s temperature?) As awareness of fertility patterns emerged, my feminine rhythm gently took the lead in Brooke’s and my relating.

I began to see that the rhythm of masculine sexuality is essentially on all the time—essentially, men are fertile all the time. Meanwhile, because women are fertile, on average, only one-third of each cycle, feminine cycles seem to invite periodic rest from sexual intercourse.

Despite my feminist perspective, I came of age expecting that I should be available for sex all the time. I remember one three- or four-month period when I was physically able and wanting to have sex every day. Surely, I thought, my boyfriend and I would stay together if I could keep this up. Now, I wonder how my access to artificial birth control contributed to such thinking.

Indeed, sterilization, the Pill, Depo-Provera, the IUD, the diaphragm, the cervical cap, and condoms give women in heterosexual relationships the option of having fewer children than earlier generations. These methods allow choice about the course of our lives. However, artificial birth control is usually distributed without substantial information about how our bodies or the methods work.

I began to wonder what price we pay when we don’t know this basic information about ourselves.

Charting my fertility signals, I felt more connected to myself, and to other women who understood their own cycles. Taking my temperature and observing my cervical fluid felt like rituals for contacting a rhythm larger than my own. Brooke and I found ourselves supported by the rhythm my charts offered. Why hadn’t we learned this method before?

Trying to Become a Fertility Awareness Teacher

Because of my passion for the method, I began writing a story about its availability in northern New Mexico. One of the people I called was the director of a Natural Family Planning clinic at an Albuquerque hospital. When the woman said she would be offering a course to train people to teach the method, I asked for an application.

“I could send you one,” she said, “but I couldn’t accept you.”

I was stunned. “Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re single and you have genital contact.” If I was celibate or married, then her program could accept me.

This was spring 1997.

I wanted to understand this clinic’s policy, which is common among Catholic programs wherein medical information is taught effectively and woven with moral messages. I wanted to understand why Fertility Awareness isn’t more available, especially in secular communities. And I wanted the name of someone who could train me to teach the method. Indeed, the NFP clinic’s policy raised numerous questions and propelled me on to a tour of conversations. I spoke with the director of medical affairs for Planned Parenthood, nurse practitioners in women’s clinics, the medical journalist Nona Aguilar, and Suzannah Doyle, who wrote about the method for Our Bodies, Ourselves.

One of the first people I called was Kara Anderson, then Planned Parenthood’s director of medical affairs. She explained that their practitioners rarely have more than twenty minutes with each client. “Most of the people who come to us have been sexually active for six months—without any birth control,” Anderson said. “Our practitioners give each woman as much as they can.”

If a Planned Parenthood client asks to learn Fertility Awareness (which is unusual), she’s usually referred elsewhere—often to a teacher affiliated with a Catholic organization. “To learn this method well,” Anderson said, “a woman needs to be in close touch with a teacher for three or four months. In many areas, Catholic organizations provide the method’s only teachers. We simply don’t have staff or finances available to offer it on a large scale, given the limited number of women who request it.”

Anderson then succinctly articulated that Fertility Awareness can “enhance people’s self-awareness, self-esteem, and communication skills. And these are things we want for all women.”

I began to see that while learning Fertility Awareness is time intensive, once a woman owns a thermometer and knows the method, there’s nothing to purchase again. I began to wonder how classes could be administered for a wide variety of people from a range of backgrounds.

My next call was to Laurie Holmes, a certified nurse-midwife who often dispenses birth control. “I’ve seen too many...