I had a lot of things on my priority list during our short engagement. Sometimes I had serious doubts as to whether or not I’d ever make it through the seemingly endless lists that a bride-to-be faces. However, one thing that was not on my priority list was thinking about Birth Control options. I had already chosen my option.

Every couple is different–some choose to start their families right away after marriage, some want to wait a few months or years before they have a child on the way. There are probably just as many reasons for waiting as for not, but whether you are wanting to avoid or achieve pregnancy, FAM-ily “Planning” just might be the answer.

How to avoid pregnancy is probably one of the number one questions each couple who decides to wait faces. Yet it seems like there is increasingly less information available about the options–or at least the information that is out there can seem to give a lop-sided view.

If you step into a clinic and inquire about Birth Control, more than likely you will find yourself piled with papers and plenty of information about a variety of chemical and hormonal birth control options. But you may or may not be given much information about barrier methods, and probably not much positive information about anything else. It is no wonder that we have a somewhat lop-sided view of the issue.

However, there are mounting concerns on many sides about “the Pill(s)” and other hormonal control methods of birth control–both for pro-life convictions and the long term health of the woman and her potential future children.

In the past, it was fairly common knowledge that birth control pills were abortive in nature. If you became pregnant while taking the pill, the pregnancy was likely to be terminated by the hormones and chemicals in the pill making it near impossible for a new little baby to grow and mature. This knowledge was often misused by those who did not value life, and caused heartache for those who did.

Pills have changed faces several times over the years. While these “new pills” have claims on no longer being strictly abortive, and in fact may be the “easy” option, these new pills still pose threats to life and health that are enough to convince me that I cannot use them.

While technically no longer abortive, the pills instead make the environment of the uterus unfriendly enough that most often the egg never implants, if indeed ovulation is not suppressed (which happens more often than we realize) and an egg is fertilized. And if the egg is fertilized and does implant, the rate of early miscarriage is greatly increased. Of course there are some successful pregnancies begun while on these new pills, but it’s a risky business. I don’t believe this new method of preventing pregnancy before implantation much better than the pills that “aborted” pregnancy after implantation.

If you believe, as I do, that life begins at the moment of conception–which is sometimes even up to 6 or more days before implantation into the wall of the uterus occurs and you are “officially” pregnant–these pills pose just as much of a problem as the pills that terminate pregnancy post implantation. Life is a precious gift. It isn’t for us to decide when that life, “unplanned” as it might have been, should end.

Some still argue that pills are not a threat to life. But from a statement made by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, we can find that this is not the case. In a short article from LifeSiteNews.org, Ellen Rice quotes the statement: “In the ‘wide variety’ of oral contraceptives that are available, the ‘mechanisms of action’ are the same, said the statement: ‘inhibition of ovulation, alteration in the cervical mucus, and/or modification of the endometrium, thus preventing implantation.’”

It may not happen every cycle, but it could happen, and it does happen all too often. Two dear girls in my family circle have miscarried while on a pill that was not supposed to affect pregnancy in the “rare case” that it might occur. The Pill was put as the fault for these two heartbreaking moments. It does happen, often times just so early on that it is never really “caught”.

Besides threatening the life of our unborn children, hormonal birth control methods come with a host of side effects, short term and long term. The ladies I’ve known who have been on the Pill have complained of things ranging from weight gain, insomnia, increased breast sensitivity and pain to major mood swings and lack of motivation. Other studies show that there are possibly other more long term effects to our health and fertility, such as increased risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke, and even lupus. The Pill depletes vitamins and minerals in your body, and also can increase the levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) in the blood. This is known to cause narrowing and hardening of the arteries. And it also could possibly create future problems with conceiving children when a couple is ready to have a family. More recently, I’ve heard of some studies which may lead one to conclude that this could lead to compromising the health of our children in the future.

Obviously, for a pro-life, health conscious couple, the “traditional” pill-means of planning and spacing the family is not an option, but there is an option that is safe and informative. It’s called FAM, the Fertility Awareness Method.

I discovered the Fertility Awareness Method, aka: FAM, sort of by accident. As a late teen, I had some odd things going on with my cycle and came across FAM as a way to chart and understand how my body worked and to hopefully pin-point an issue if there was one. As an unmarried girl I wasn’t interesting in fertility awareness, and I was slightly skeptical about the claims that FAM would even work as “birth control”. A few months of charting, some reading and comparing and thinking–and I was convinced that it really could work. And it did not violate my principles and values, nor did it destroy health.

In FAM, I found something much better than hormone-altering pills or patches, something that helped a woman to understand and see the wonderful way God created us, and something that left open that “embrace” of life, and the possibility and beauty of any Surprise Blessings to form into healthy, and precious little people, instead of another broken place in a Mother’s heart.

Natural Family Planning (NFP) and the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) have been marked as useless and ineffective when it comes to avoiding pregnancy. Further research and examination show that it isn’t the method, but the lack of sticking to the “rules” that made NFP and FAM have such low rates of success. And truthfully, the only 100% “fail proof” method of birth control is total and complete abstinence at all times, and that is not a part of any healthy marriage.

While I don’t have the years of experience under my belt that some couples have, I’ve been using FAM to chart my cycles for over two years all together, and my man and I have used it to avoid pregnancy for 10 cycles in the seven months of our marriage. It does work. It does not destroy our health. And it does not destroy the possibility of the precious gift of new life. This is why we chose FAM.

Stay tuned for “FAM-ily Planning: How”–coming soon!

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