Contraception: Why Not? (part 20)
This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith. If you have not read the previous post please do so now. If you need to start at the beginning, then please read “Contraception Preamble“.
Slide: Responsible Parenthood
The Church doesn’t teach that you have to have as many children as your body can bear. This picture is of the little old woman who lived in a shoe; she had so many children she didn’t know what to do. The Church teaches that spouses should practice what is called responsible parenting. God wants parents to enjoy their children. Those who have children often find themselves really fatigued. That’s normal. It’s just that it should not be the dominant feeling in your life. You want the dominant feeling to be gratitude. Grateful for your spouse and grateful for your children. If you’re starting to feel dragged down by it all, it’s probably time to push the pause button and get a little bit of rest. Get the diapers under control. And you probably will be soon wanting at some point to have another one when you’re feeling less overwhelmed.
Slide: Natural Family Planning
The Church approves of what is called Natural Family Planning or NFP. NFP is not the old rhythm method. It has nothing to do with counting days. I’m going to be explaining NFP by reference to days and numbers, but that’s irrelevant really to what I’m saying here; any woman can use NFP no matter how irregular her cycles.
A woman is a relatively infertile creature. For a long time it has been said that a woman is born with all of the eggs that she is ever going to have. Now some researchers are saying women may produce more during their lifetime, but, whatever is the case, women have only a couple hundred thousand eggs, maybe at the most a million or so. Males, on the other hand, are unbelievably fertile: any male has four to five, six to seven million sperm in any ejaculation. So, comparatively speaking, women are incredibly infertile.
Women ripen and release only one egg a month. That egg lives in a woman’s body for only 24 hours. It can be fertilized for only 12 of those 24 hours. So there is only a 12-hour window every month when a woman can get pregnant. It’s more complicated than that, of course. At the beginning of a month a woman has a few days of bleeding. That’s because she didn’t conceive the month before. During the last cycle she built up an endometrium which was prepared to receive a new little fertilized ovum, a new little human being. If there’s no little human being, she sheds the endometrium. Then a woman has what are called dry days that can last for several days. There is no bleeding and there is no fertile mucus. Her body is resting from having bled for a couple days. She’s got to restore herself. At the same time her body is preparing for the next cycle of ovulation. She is starting to produce hormones that are going to cause her ovaries to ripen and release an egg and send it down the fallopian tube. As those hormones are preparing that egg for ripening and releasing, the woman is starting to produce a certain kind of fertile mucus that she can recognize in her system. It is present throughout the whole fertile phase. It disappears about two or three days after she’s ovulated.
If that fertile mucus appears on a Monday, but a woman doesn’t ovulate until Friday, she can get pregnant from any act of sexual intercourse she had between Monday and Friday because the fertile mucus helps preserve the sperm and carries it to meet the egg. If she has sexual intercourse on Monday, but not Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and ovulates on Friday, she could get pregnant from the act of sexual intercourse that she had on Monday although it is only about a three percent chance. On the day that she ovulates she has about a 43-47 percent chance of getting pregnant. Twenty-four hours later the egg dies if it is not fertilized. The woman cannot get pregnant for the rest of the month. It’s absolutely impossible. It’s only during the fertile part of the month that a woman can get pregnant. She cannot possibly get pregnant during the first third of the month since there is no egg available. She cannot possibly get pregnant for the final third of the month because there’s no egg available. The egg has come and the egg has gone. At about the same time the fertile mucus dries up. So a woman knows that she has ovulated and she’s not going to ovulate again. Her temperature also goes up a bit and stays up for the rest of the month. So when a woman sees her temperature rise for a couple days in a row, she knows that she has ovulated, the egg has come and the egg has gone and she cannot get pregnant for the rest of the month. There’s also a change in her cervix that alerts her that she has entered the fertile days and exited the fertile days.
Ninety three percent of women can learn how to read their bodily signs with one month of observation. Ninety-three percent of women figure out right away when the fertile mucus is present. The other seven percent, however, have some trouble reading their signs of fertility. Some of these women have a problem because they are infertile. If a woman is infertile the signs of fertility are not going to show up. She is not going to have the mucus because she is not producing the hormones to help her ovulate. A very good way for a woman to determine whether she’s fertile or infertile is to use natural family planning. There may be other reasons for unreliable signs besides infertility. A woman, for instance, might be taking medication that dries up the mucus. She might have allergies that cause her to produce mucus during the infertile days. But almost every woman within 3 to 4 months of observing bodily signs can determine when she’s fertile and when she’s infertile.
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Tags: Catholic, Contraception, Contraception: Why Not?, Fertility, Natural Family Planning, NFP, Professor Janet E. Smith, Sex