Your Grandmother’s Birth Control Might Actually Work

Lately, our thinking about birth control seems to be shifting. Earlier this summer, the Guttmacher Institute released a study showing that proper use of the withdrawal method is nearly as effective as condoms, and, as Double X’s Jessica Grose pointed out, lots of young, educated women are using it. Meanwhile, abstinence-only education funding has been zeroed out, and Guttmacher just published another study that reveals young women often abandon birth control methods they don't like. Several different liberal media outlets have been hashing out options beyond the trusty condom.

So why has nobody mentioned the highly effective, completely natural fertility awareness method, or its Catholic sister, natural family planning?

I was introduced to FAM when sex became inexplicably painful for me after using the NuvaRing for several years. It took three doctors to figure out what was going on before one gynecologist realized the NuvaRing wasn’t correctly replacing my body’s estrogen. Instead, it was actually thinning my vaginal walls, menopause-style. I’m 25. This was not good.

“Shouldn’t I go off birth control?” I asked, horrified. “It’s never really vibed with my body.”

My doctor’s response? “Don’t go off the Ring! Just use this extra estrogen cream every day.”

But putting more hormones in my body seemed counterintuitive. There must be another way, I thought.

My partner never liked condoms, and diaphragms make me vulnerable to urinary tract infections. Since I didn’t like the idea of an invasive vaginal procedure, an IUD was out, too. That’s when a friend lent me Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility. The book explains a scientific birth control method that allows a woman to know her six-day fertility window: When a woman is fertile, her morning basal temperature rises and her discharge is slippery and stretchy. Unlike the mythological rhythm method, which assumes all women ovulate on the 10th day of their periods, FAM and NFP rely on signs, not day-counting, although charting is part of the process. When the signs all match up, the woman knows not to have sex or use a barrier method.

NFP and FAM were developed in the '50s, when scientists began to better understand how the menstrual cycle worked. They’re side-effect free, virtually cost-free and can be 95 percent to 98 percent effective when done correctly (although those numbers can slip down to anywhere from 91 percent to as low as 80 percent, depending upon how thoroughly the couple practices the method). Their effectiveness is akin to condoms, which are 98 percent effective with perfect use and 85 percent effective with typical use.

Of course, these “organic” alternatives entail considerably more effort than simply rolling down a layer of latex. I decided to do some research on whether FAM/NFP was worth the effort, so I sent out an e-mail asking for testimonials from women who use those methods. I got dozens of responses within days. “Megan,” 33, loves FAM because “I’m in touch with exactly what my body is going through.” Others like that FAM can be a team effort between the woman and her partner, who needs to be clued into his mate’s biological signals—“Jane,” 30, thinks it can “erase the dynamic of ‘woman as all-knowing gatekeeper’ and ‘man as ignorant beggar’ ” when it comes to sex and pregnancy.