In Our Control by Laura Eldridge

Author:Laura Eldridge [Eldridge, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-241-7
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Running in Cycles: Fertility Awareness and Natural Birth Control

I’m dreaming now: of adolescents knowing how their reproductive systems work before they become sexually active and before they choose a birth control method; of women and men being as aware of our fertility as we are about our sexuality.

—Katie Singer

Something was in the air as I took the podium to talk to a group of graduate students in Washington, DC, in February 2009. I hesitated as I began to speak, sharing the history of hormonal contraception and moving on to the current issues surrounding birth control today. When I opened up the conversation for questions, hands flew up. I expected some to be annoyed about my cautious attitude toward the Pill or perhaps curious about new drugs like menstrual suppressants. Instead, the women wanted to know about fertility awareness.

“Given the lack of innovation in pharmaceutical contraception and the dangers of existing methods,” asked a quiet, chicly dressed redhead, “what is the future of birth control? Is it fertility awareness?” Mumbles of agreement spread around the sunny conference room.

It wasn’t the first time I had faced this question. In the past year or so, friends had begun to inquire in hushed tones about the possibility of natural birth control. We had all been raised in the church of the Pill, and such talk was blasphemous. The reasons to fear natural methods were well known: they were unreliable, risky, and the near-exclusive practice of quite another church. And yet as my friends edged closer to thirty and problems with other types of birth control persisted, they began to chip away at the gospel of pharmaceutical infallibility. They came to me because I was a well-known heretic.

What are the facts and fictions surrounding natural birth control methods, particularly fertility awareness? Is it indeed a viable method of managing fertility, simply a useful system for acquiring knowledge of one’s body that should have little to do with contraception, or an unreliable crackpot method suitable only for religious fanatics and pharmaceutical alarmists? How do religious and social relationships affect the acceptance and availability of knowledge about this type of fertility control, and are those historical alliances shifting?

History, Naturally

A surprising fact about the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), either as a method of birth control or a tool for improved gynecological health, is that it is a modern method that stands alongside the Pill as a twentieth-century innovation. Although women have been manipulating their fertility for as long as they have been menstruating, good knowledge about the ovary and how it functions has emerged slowly over the past two thousand years. While interest in the uterus was more profound until the end of the nineteenth century, these olive-shaped and sized organs have attracted ample speculation and misinterpretation over the course of recorded human history, and only in recent years have we come to fully understand what they do and how they do it.

It is impossible to know who was the first individual, driven by curiosity, eccentricity, or

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