How NFP is Safe and Healthy

Why is NFP Safe?

In the practice of systematic Natural Family Planning, you simply observe the signs of fertility and infertility that God built into female human nature. In the practice of ecological breastfeeding, you simply nurse your baby frequently. What could be safer and more in tune with nature?

NFP uses no birth control drugs or devices. Every drug has potential side effects, and you should not take a drug product unless it is necessary to cure or relieve something that is wrong with you. But your fertility is a normal process, not a disease. Birth control chemicals are at best unnecessary drugs.

You may not appreciate how safe NFP is for you personally until you understand the risks of chemical birth control (the Pill, implants, Depo shots and other injections) and invasive devices (the Intrauterine Device, or IUD). You may think that whatever birth control chemicals are being sold now are perfectly safe. Not so.
See The Pill- How does it work? Is it safe?

Remember that drug companies have consistently claimed great safety for every birth control drug that has ever appeared (since 1960, in fact). It is generally only when they come out with a "new generation" of the Pill that they admit the problems of the "old" Pill. Keep also in mind that most IUDs were taken off the American market because of health-related lawsuits. Lastly, you should be aware that some physicians have linked chemical spermicides with birth defects.

Why is NFP Healthy?

The practice of NFP promotes good health in three ways:
1. With NFP charting, you will quickly find out if you have a more or less normal cycle pattern. A truly abnormal cycle pattern can be an early indication that something may be wrong. Some cycle irregularities may indicate dietary problems or low thyroid activity. Occasionally a woman detects a more serious disorder just by changes on her chart. She is then able to seek medical help much sooner. Sometimes relief for irregularities is as simple as improving nutrition or getting your weight into a better balance with your height. An inability to achieve this balance may have its root causes in a physiological problem and not in a deficiency lack of willpower. Discovering more about your fertility may help you avoid unnecessary loss of self-esteem due to a weight problem.

Sometimes a cycle irregularity is due to something quite a bit more serious:

One young couple was married just a few months. She felt fine, but her cycle just went on and on and on without ovulation. A medical examination revealed cancer of the thyroid gland. The cancerous gland was successfully removed: she took a simple drug to make up for the absence of the gland, and she returned to having regular cycles.

2. The practice of NFP encourages better nutrition. We have been amazed at how poorly some young women eat, and for them practicing NFP has a real benefit. With NFP you become more aware of your general state of health and well being. By learning more about your fertility, you will be encouraged to make sure that you and your family are getting proper nutrition. Good nutrition is so important for so many aspects of your menstrual-fertility cycle that CCL publishes Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition. The author, Marilyn Shannon, has an advanced degree in human physiology, is a teacher of NFP, and has done extensive counseling related to fertility, nutrition and NFP
.Nutrition Catalog: Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition

3. The practice of ecological breastfeeding, the world's oldest form of natural family planning, provides the best nutrition for your baby, and extended breastfeeding is a positive means of reducing the risk of breast cancer. You will find much more about this in Chapter 24 of The Art of Natural Family Planning and also in Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing available from the CCL Catalog.
See Mothering & Women's Health Catalog: Breastfeeding & Natural Childspacing

Use NFP in Achieving Pregnancy or to Postpone Pregnancy

Achieving Pregnancy

If you and your spouse are like most young couples, you assume that you are highly fertile. Most likely you are. However, approximately 20% of couples today have problems achieving pregnancy when they want to. If there is a true, permanent physical reason that makes either of you infertile, then NFP will not help. But if you are suffering from reduced or marginal fertility, then the fertility awareness that NFP provides of your fertile signs of NFP can help you greatly.
Many couples of low fertility achieve pregnancy within six months of learning NFP simply by using the cost-free, low-tech approach of fertility awareness provided by NFP. Sometimes spouses have to make minor changes in nutrition and exercise, but nothing extraordinary is required

Postponing Pregnancy

How effective is NFP when used to avoid pregnancy?

The short answer is this: the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP can be used at the 99% level of effectiveness to postpone or avoid pregnancy.

You may find that hard to believe, especially if you have read the typical articles about birth control in women's magazines. Back in the mid-1970s, there was similar skepticism on the part of the birth control experts of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services). They were persuaded to conduct what has become known as the Los Angeles Study.

This study was not designed to find out how effective each method of NFP could be under the best conditions with the best available teachers. It was designed only to compare the different systems of NFP under similar conditions.

If you are concerned about avoiding pregnancy, you can take heart from the conclusion of the Los Angeles Study: "There were no method failures in the STM (Sympto-Thermal Method) group" (Maclyn E. Wade, et al., "A random prospective study of the use-effectiveness of two methods of natural family planning," Am. J. Ob and Gyn 141:4 (15 Oct 1981) 368-376). "Method failures" are unplanned pregnancies among couples who follow the rules of a method of birth control.

The Couple to Couple League does not claim the 100% method effectiveness found by the Los Angeles Study. We know from experience that sooner or later there will be unexplained pregnancies. Nothing in Nature holds without rare exceptions. However, this study and others give us very solid grounds for saying that adequately instructed couples can practice the Sympto-Thermal Method at a 99% level of effectiveness.

Ecological breastfeeding provides 14 to 15 months of postpartum infertility, on the average. The range appears to follow a more or less standard statistical distribution with 72% of such mothers experiencing their first period between 9 and 20 months, and a few experiencing it sooner and later.

For more information about method effectiveness see Effectiveness of NFP.

Morally Acceptable Easy to Learn and Easy to Use

Morally Acceptable Ecological Breastfeeding

The most important question about any form of "family planning" is this: Does it respect God's plan for love, marriage and sexuality?

There can be no question about ecological breastfeeding. God, the author of nature, built that part of natural family planning into female human nature.

However, from biblical times, the Christian Tradition has condemned as immoral all unnatural forms of birth control. The American Protestant majority enshrined this conviction in the Comstock laws of 1873 that banned the sale and distribution of contraceptive devices. This subject is developed further in several publications available in the CCL Catalog

Systematic Natural Family Planning is also morally acceptable provided that couples do not use it selfishly. In The Art of Natural Family Planning, Chapter 16, "Planning, Providence and Prudence," examines the proper use of NFP.
See Basic NFP Materials - The Art of NFP

Easy to Learn

When you attend NFP classes taught by CCL, you learn enough at the first class to enable you to practice NFP right away. Assuming you are married, you don't need to wait a full cycle. You learn enough in the first meeting to know when you are in the postovulation part of the cycle in your very first charted cycle. By the time you finish the second meeting a month later, you will also know how to determine your pre-ovulation time.

If you teach yourself through the CCL Home Study Course, try to do one lesson every other day. In that way, you will learn all the basic rules within a month.

Easy to Use

Most couples are able to use the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP without further counseling after their first two or three cycles of experience. They tend to settle down into a certain pattern that is best handled by just a couple of the rules, rather than having to apply and know every detail of the method.

In other words, they really could write down all that they need to know in their use of NFP on either side of a business card.

To see that this is possible: view this PDF file (5K)
(PDF is a format which will display in Adobe Acrobat Reader, free from Adobe and in some newer browsers.)

Once in a while you may have a strange looking chart. That is when your membership in CCL comes in handy. If you run into something out of the ordinary, call your local Teaching Couple. (They will provide you with their telephone number at class.) Their professional training is mostly about how to apply the standard STM rules in out of the ordinary situations.

If you move later on or if you learned through the Home Study Course, free counseling is available to you as a CCL member through our Central headquarters. Often, we will be able to direct you to a nearby couple for counseling and support. Otherwise, we have trained counselors on staff to discuss your cycle and advise you on how to proceed.

However, most of the time you will have normal cycles, and you will find it very easy to apply the rules of NFP with confidence.

Enviromentally Sound, Naturally Beautiful and Inexpensive

Environmentally Sound

If you want to live with nature and if you believe that nature has the last word, you have one more excellent reason for using only the natural methods of birth regulation. If someone is concerned about eating healthily, wouldn't it be highly inconsistent for her to be polluting her body with powerful chemicals? If someone is concerned about the well-being of trees and birds and animals, shouldn't he be much more concerned about the life of his child within his wife's womb?

Note that long-lasting solutions to basic ecological and environmental problems depend upon people practicing self-control in one way or another. Conserving water can mean not wasting it with long, luxurious showers or turning on the lawn sprinkler during the heat of the day, even though that might be more convenient. Recycling garbage can take up almost as much of an environmentally concerned person's time as a minor hobby. Not dumping chemicals and toxic substances in landfills can entail going to burdensome lengths to ensure that the land and water table are protected from them.

We accept self-control in all of these examples above as an integral part of environmental responsibility. The same applies when we deal with the issues of birth regulation. It takes self-control to practice NFP, but it pays off in the benefits that accrue to our health and in the more important "ecology" of our marriages.

Natural Beauty

NFP leaves the marital embrace in its natural beauty. Contraceptive condoms, sponges, diaphragms, jellies, and foams have definite problems in the area of "aesthetics"--they are downright unpleasant. They make it extremely obvious to the couple that they are interfering with the natural character of the sexual act. Some of these contraceptives also prevent spontaneity in lovemaking. Couples who are really serious about avoiding pregnancy with these methods use two or three of them together. Former users of these methods tell us that when they used a condom and diaphragm with spermicidal jelly, they felt as if they were girding up for war, not love.
The Pill did not introduce birth control to the world. Almost all the early Pill users in the 1960s were married couples who wanted an aesthetically-pleasing alternative to barrier contraceptives. Yet the Pill has its own psychologically unpleasant side-effect: it reduces sexual desire in 14 to 50% of women who use it, due to the fact that the birth control hormones fool their bodies into thinking that they are pregnant. Women who have experienced pregnancy can attest to the reduction in libido produced by the hormonal changes that occur in gestation.

In addition, the Pill also causes the body to mimic the symptoms of perpetual late-cycle infertility. One of these symptoms is the drying up of the body's reproductive lubrication system, which causes an increase in the amount of pain encountered in sexual intercourse.

So, here we have a disinterested woman enduring a painful act of "lovemaking"--does this bear any relationship to the dream of natural, spontaneous sexual enjoyment that was once promised to Pill users?

Inexpensive

By a conservative estimate a woman using the Pill will pay around $20 per month for her prescription. Once learned, NFP is as close to free as air. And even clean air will cost you more, depending on the type of filter you install on your furnace.

Lifelong, Reversable, and Designer Family Planning

Lifelong

As you go through married life, you will go through different stages regarding your fertility. There may be times when you believe you should postpone pregnancy; at other times, you may feel called to achieve pregnancy. After the birth of a baby, the way you feed and nurture your baby will affect how soon your fertility returns. The form of nursing called "ecological breastfeeding" that CCL teaches can space babies two years apart on average without any fertility awareness or abstinence. Eventually, the day will come when you enter premenopause, the time of decreasing fertility before menopause (when you cease ovulating). NFP is there to help you in each stage of your fertile lifetime.

The combination of ecological breastfeeding and not using birth control hormones is your best protection against breast cancer. Using NFP and not resorting to tubal sterilization is your best hope for entering your menopausal years with healthy internal organs. Remember that your female reproductive organs are still very important after you are beyond your childbearing years.

Reversible

NFP is immediately reversible. You simply change your plans about when to engage in the marriage act (have intercourse), based on your signs of fertility awareness of fertility in your past cycles. On the other hand, Pill manufacturers warn against seeking pregnancy for three months after stopping the Pill. (They don't want lawsuits alleging birth defects resulting from using their chemicals.)
CCL receives many painful letters from couples regretting their decision to have tubal ligations or vasectomies. Although these surgeries can sometimes be "reversed" at considerable cost, the probabilities of successful conception and implantation occurring are so low that it is misleading to call sterilization "reversible."

Designer Family Planning

We teach couples more than one method of NFP. As mentioned above, there are two basic methods for spacing babies naturally: ecological breastfeeding and periodic abstinence. The first does not require any fertility awareness charting or abstinence on the part of the couple. Instead it generally provides months and months of breastfeeding infertility--on average babies will be spaced about two years apart with ecological breastfeeding.
The other method, "periodic abstinence," has several components for identifying the fertile and infertile times. The Couple to Couple League recommends using these components in a cross-checking way—the Sympto-Thermal system. This allows you to use what works best for you. If you want a custom-fit method of birth regulation, tailored to your needs and your physiology, then the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP taught by CCL is for you.

Question and Answers on Tubal Ligations and Vasectomies

Questions and Answers
By Keith Bowers,CCLI

Few Choices are more serious than that of a woman to prevent pregnancy by surgical sterilization. Every year hundreds of thousands of women make that choice. They may be driven by fear of sickness or death from the Pill or IUD and their abortion-causing effects, fear of unplanned pregnancies resulting from the less effective barrier methods, and sometimes fear of exercising sexual self-control.

Many couples turn to surgical sterilization out of desperation, but later come to regard this step as drastic and unwise especially when they learn about the highly effective modern method of natural family planning known as the Sympto-Thermal Method.

What is tubal ligation?

A tubal ligation is a surgical operation performed to make a woman sexually sterile. There are two common methods of tubal ligation; minilaparotomy and laparoscopy. A minilaparotomy involves making a small incision in the abdomen and locating the fallopian tubes, which conduct the eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. After the tubes are found and drawn outside the body through the incision, a portion of each tube is removed and the ends are tied.

In laparoscopy the woman’s abdomen is first inflated with carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide gas, creating a gap between the bowel and the abdomen. A fiberoptic light is inserted (by puncturing the abdominal wall) and an instrument either coagulates the tubes with an electric current or places a band or clip on the tubes.

What are the health risks of tubal ligation?

"Depending on the sterilization technique used, between 800 and 2,000 women per 100,000 can expect a major complication..at the time of operation," according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.5

Minilaparotomy patients may suffer from such complications as infection, injury to the bladder or bleeding from a major blood vessel, and burning of the bowel or other structures. There also can be anesthesia complications.6

Laparoscopy has serious complications such as perforation of the bowel leading to massive infection of the abdominal cavity, complications from anesthesia, improper clearance of the windpipe during the operation, even pulmonary embolism.7 Dr. H.P. Dunn noted, "Every operation carries the risk of hemorrhage or infection... Some patients have died from cardiac failure during the inflation procedure. Others have suffered wounds of the bowel, bladder, and large blood vessels. Even intraperitonela explosions have occurred."8

For more information see www.ccli.org/articles/tublpr.shtml

THE RELATIVE PERMANENCE of surgical sterilization causes people to pause before taking such a serious step. Yet, driven by fear--fear of sickness or death from the Pill or IUD and their abortion-causing effects, fear of unplanned pregnancies resulting from the less effective barrier methods, and sometimes fear of exercising sexual self-control--many couples turn to surgical sterilization out of desperation.

Many of these couples later regard this step as drastic and unwise especially after they have become informed about the highly effective modern method of natural family planning knows as the Sympto-Thermal Method.

What is vasectomy?

A vasectomy is a surgical operation performed to make a man sexually sterile. In a vasectomy, a doctor cuts out a portion of both ducts (vas deferens) through which sperm pass from the testes; then he ties or coagulates the ends and sutures the cut made in the scrotum. Usually performed under local anesthesia, the operation is relatively painless, although some swelling and tenderness are common during the brief recovery period.

Is vasectomy 100% effective?

No. The only 100% effective sterilization surgeries are male castration (removal of both testicles) and female castration (removal of both ovaries); these surgeries are simply not performed for birth control purposes.

What are the health risks of vasectomy?

Although the final verdict on the health risks of vasectomy is not in, suspicions are rising that the long-term effects on a man’s immunological system can pose serious health problems. Criticism is mounting within the medical community about the uncritical way in which vasectomy has been declared medically safe. Between 10% and 15% of adult men in the U.S. have been vasectomized3and yet, as Dr. H. J. Roberts has written, "I know of no other operation performed on humans that induces responses to such a degree by the immune system."4

What happens to the sperm?

After a vasectomy, sperm production continues as before, around 50,000 spermatozoa per minute.5 Lacking a normal anatomical passage, these cells are either consumed by destroyer cells (macrophages) or degenerate and produce antigens that cause antibodies to be produced.6

What about the risk of cancer?

In the early 1980s, Dr. Richard Ablin, researcher at the Hwektoen Institute in Chicago, hypothesizes that prostate cancer could be caused by unejaculated sperm. A decade later, epidemiologists reported an "unexpected association " between vasectomy and prostate cancer. One study found the risk of this cancer increased between 3.5 to 5.3 times;14 a separate study found an overall risk 1.7 times greater beginning 12 years after vasectomy, rising to 2.2 times (more than double the risk) between 13 and 18 years later.15 Two large studies of vasectomized men were conducted through the Harvard Medical School and published in 1993. They found the overall risk of prostate cancer increased between 56 and 60%, increasing to 89% for those who had vasectomies 20 or more years earlier.16

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among American men, claiming some 30,000 lives per year. Although these studies did not prove any conclusive link between vasectomy and prostate cancer, the American Urological Association urged that patients be informed of the risk on the basis of these papers.17

Increased risks of lung cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma were noted among men 20 years after vasectomy.18 The Coronary Artery Surgery Study, analyzing 1106 men, found a two-and-a-half times higher risk of kidney stones among vasectomized patients 30-35 years old.19 An association with testicular cancer has also been noted.20 A healthy immune system is our day-to-day defense against cancer. The authors of the Harvard studies hypothesized "the immune response to sperm antigens following vasectomy may enhance tumor growth by blocking of antibodies of tumor suppresser cells by sperm antigens."21

For more information see www.ccli.org/article/vasectpr.shtml