Brownies & Sherbet, by Nikko Snyder

(Originally published in good girl magazine No. 2, Winter 2002)

Most people stare in disbelief when I tell them I'm learning to practice fertility awareness as a means of natural birth control. "You mean the rhythm method?" they ask, incredulous.

I bristle. The rhythm method is outdated and ineffective, and has a lot of negative connotations. It involves watching the calendar to guess-timate when ovulation occurs, which isn't what I do, or what I suggest anyone else try. On the other hand, natural birth control is both simple and effective - and although mainstream wisdom has dismissed it summarily, I'm of the opinion that it's time to reconsider it.

I started out with the same sceptical attitude as anyone else. Apart from being confused with the rhythm method, natural birth control has two major image problems. The first is its perceived association with religion. It's the only form of birth control that the Catholic Church condones (but, interestingly, only if you're not trying to prevent conception). It's also the one method that's promoted by Christian organizations that condemn abortion, the Pill and sometimes even Sex Ed in schools. As a result, people often assume that religion is the only reason anyone would practice natural birth control - otherwise, why not play it safe and take advantage of condoms, spermicides, the Pill, and everything else modern science has to offer?

An even bigger obstacle for natural birth control advocates is that most physicians and school Sex Ed programs preach non-natural forms of birth control - especially the Pill - just as evangelically as some Christian groups denounce them. My doctor, for one, regards the Pill as a kind of panacea; she practically forces it down my throat every time I go to see her. And although my only specific memory of grade 8 Sex Ed is an image of a classmate putting a condom on a wooden post, I somehow came away with a firm belief that a sexually active girl had no good reason not to be on the Pill.

For me, these attitudes to birth control are closely linked to a feeling of fear and mistrust of my own body, which began in junior high and stayed with me until the recent past. My body always felt like it was just waiting to get me in trouble if I didn't keep a firm hold on it. I've often wondered if I should pack it in and accept the Pill as an inevitable part of life as a post-modern, heterosexually active girl. But I don't accept it. I've finally realized that some of the assumptions ingrained in me during adolescence, and reinforced by every doctor I've talked to since, just aren't worth hanging on to. I'm not interested in being labelled and boxed in and dictated to. I'd much rather come up with my own answers, and I don't care if it means defending them against the medical establishment, women's magazines, and even the Pope.

It was over brownies and sherbet one night, sitting around the kitchen table with three women friends, that I first started thinking seriously about fertility awareness. Before then, if you'd asked me whether I thought we understood our menstrual cycles, my answer would have been simple: hell yeah! My friends are all intelligent, confident, powerful women, and I assumed this sort of fundamental self-knowledge was well within our grasp.

But when the topic came up, the four of us were disconcerted to find that we couldn't agree on the basic workings of our ovaries, uteruses, and cervices. It took several hours examining diagrams and reading aloud before we were able to come to a consensus. We had been outrageously ill informed! We were used to thinking of the menstrual cycle as abstract and mysterious, like something that happened to other people. As women who regard ourselves as empowered and aware, we were rattled to discover huge gaps in our knowledge on this personal, momentous subject.

Since that night, I've done some major rethinking about fertility and birth control, and I've become certain that the ways we're taught to think about birth control are not the best for everyone. The official line on birth control, whether it comes from religious or medical sources, fails to recognize that there is no one right approach, and that every woman needs to come up with her own answer, in her own way. Having said that, I'd like to share the information that came up over brownies and sherbet, and helped transform me into the natural birth control practitioner and advocate that I am today.

Probably the most confusing and contentious point in our discussion was the question when women are most likely to get pregnant. I had thought (and I wasn't alone) that the riskiest time to have sex was directly before my period. I mean, doesn't the egg just hang out, waiting for a sperm for as long as possible, until the lining of the uterus finally gives up and releases itself? No! We were amazed to discover that an egg only lives for around 24 hours after ovulation. It's actually the sperm that can live for up to 5 days, swimming around persistently, looking for the jackpot. So, to grossly oversimplify: in order to avoid getting pregnant, you need to know exactly which day the egg is alive, and avoid letting sperm anywhere near it for five days beforehand.

The problem is that with something like birth control, it's very dangerous to oversimplify. So how do you know for certain when is the egg alive? Again, it makes sense that it would be just before your period starts, right? Wrong! In fact, as soon as you finish your period your body starts getting ready to release a new egg. Most women ovulate about a week after their period finishes; for a woman with a 28-day cycle, it's usually around day 14 (day 1 being the first day of her period). After ovulation, as soon as the egg dies, you're home free until the cycle starts again.

The only mystery remaining is: how do you know when you ovulate? It turns out that it's not actually mysterious at all. Your cervix sends you a clear message that you're getting ready to ovulate by excreting mucus. Right after your period, there's not much cervical mucus, and when you start to notice it, you're entering your fertile period. A few days before ovulation, the mucus becomes more elastic and stretchy (you can stretch it about an inch from your thumb to index finger); this consistency encourages the sperm to swim along. The stretchy mucus (did you ever think you'd read the word 'mucus' so many times on a single page?) lasts for a few days until you reach the peak mucus day: the day you ovulate. After that day, the mucus changes noticeably to a type that's not so elastic and sperm-friendly.

It boils down to this: a woman is fertile from the first day that stretchy mucus appears until four days after it changes to non-stretchy mucus. The consistency of our cervical mucus changes, rain or shine, when we're about to ovulate. Checking for mucus may seem unusual or gross, but it takes about as long as popping a pill, and, if done properly, it's about 98.5% effective as a birth control method.(1)

This is not an incitement to flush your pills down the toilet, or to make water balloons out of your condoms and throw them off your roof at passers-by. These may be the forms of birth control that work best for you. But it's good to know that there are options other than packaged hormones and latex. I like the idea that my body, far from being out to get me, sends a message to help me out every month, and that all I have to do is pay attention.
It's high time that schools and doctors start teaching girls what really goes on in our bodies, so that we can start to make our own choices.

1 Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, Christiane Northrup M.D.

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