A Journey Worth Taking

Our Natural Family Planning journey has not always been an easy one, but I am able to stand here today and say that it was all worth it.

In hindsight, I have always had a fairly accurate handle on my own cycles, but I didn’t get super serious about it until after I got married. I was raised Catholic – received all of the sacraments and was confirmed and married in the church. NFP was something I was familiar with, but knew very little about. I was convinced it did not work even though it was touted as an effective alternative to artificial contraception. I couldn’t help but see the families that practiced NFP and the large number of children they had. Sure, it was natural, but it didn’t look very “planned.” It never occurred to me that many children would be conceived purposefully.

I will be the first to admit that I have tried many forms of artificial birth control in the past.

While on hormonal contraception, I experienced a surge of increased anxiety, depression, sleeplessness and mood swings which were all completely invalidated by my gynecologist, and every other doctor, for that matter.

I trusted my instincts on this one, and I feel God pushed me to dig a little deeper. Much of the information actually comes with the birth control packets in very fine print, I might add. But like so many, I followed this social norm blindly and failed to read up on what I was actually ingesting or inserting into my body.

Through my own research, I found so many women with similar stories and the truth was revealed to me about artificial birth control. There is no denying that the birth control I was taking—which was chock-full of hormones—was responsible for the fluctuations in my mood, sleeping patterns, and more.

I find it puzzling, that in our society we try to avoid carcinogens and find hormones in food undesirable, yet the astronomically higher amount of hormones that are found in a single dose of artificial birth control taken daily are overlooked and deemed acceptable. Hormonal birth control has actually been classified as a class one carcinogen – the same as cigarette smoking.

Here I was, a young woman with regular cycles and a fully functioning reproductive system, and I was buying into the lie that my fertility was broken and needed to be fixed by an alternative and artificial contraceptive method. All too often, the thought of conceiving a child is considered frightening and children are viewed as burdens, so we try to control and fix something that is not broken by means of drugs, devices, or surgeries.

Around this time, God placed a burden on my heart. My husband and I are both pro-life activists, and a harsh truth came to light. While ovulation is suppressed most of the time in a woman taking the birth control pill, breakthrough ovulation does still occur a significant percentage of the time. When that happens, and a couple is intimate, fertilization can occur, and a baby is formed. Because the birth control pill also thins and changes the lining of the uterus, the newly conceived child will have difficulty implanting in the inhospitable uterus, and so this second line of defense will ABORT the newly conceived baby. Life begins at conception, right? Being pro-life and pro-artificial birth control are entirely conflicting stances.

With this realization, NFP became the only option for us. We certainly did not want to use methods that could abort our children. And, as a woman, I would prefer to steer clear of methods that could give me cancer.

As we delved into NFP, I realized the science behind it IS sound. It is actually more effective at avoiding pregnancy than artificial forms of birth control. Naturally, I couldn’t help but see the irony — like so many seasons in my life, I tried to take control instead of letting God step in. Family planning was no exception.

There are many effective NFP methods, and I always encourage couples to try and find the one that works best for them.

My husband and I have two children, a five-year-old little boy and a seventeen-month-old daughter. NFP has been a blessing to our marriage. It allows shared responsibility for family planning … as it should be, in my opinion. It keeps us on the same page and opens up tremendous communication. It helped us conceive within the first month of trying with each of our children. It has given us the grace to surrender yet another aspect of our own human control over to God, and has allowed us to remain open to the exciting possibility of more children within God’s will for our family.