The Danger of Fertility Awareness

UPDATE: Some people are upset with me for implying that fertility awareness is dangerous. Fair enough. FAM is a very reliable method. What is not always reliable is us. Maybe I should have titled the post thus:

Be An Idiot About Fertility Awareness

As you may recall, I learned about recognizing the signs of fertility earlier last year. It’s really quite easy to do when your hormones are well balanced and you eat plenty of protein and nutrients and keep the carbohydrates fairly low (i.e. not high).

When a woman’s body is healthy, it  speaks a clear language; all we have to do is know how to listen.

FAM wouldn’t have been very accurate for me when I was younger, of course, because I was malnourished, had PCOS, yeast infections (could have never recognized differences in discharge consistency), and had amenorrhea – i.e. my periods were sporadic and rare. They were also unbelievably painful and long. There was not really anything to detect about ovulation even my temperature fluctuated wildly. I didn’t ovulate very often and when I did the egg would end up enveloped by a cyst and hurt like hell.

Once I quit eating gluten my periods improved. Once I went Paleo I became fertile again. It was still quite a bit later that my hormones actually balanced and my cycles were “normal.” For me that took strict avoidance of foods that I’m allergic to and recovery of my nutritional status.For someone like me there was no family planning. There was either birth control or there was the potential for some random pregnancy. That was that. I did the pill thing over a decade ago for a year or two. It was a miserable experience so I quit and just forgot about birth control because I was infertile anyway until, of course, I went Paleo. Then I wasn’t infertile anymore and I had my daughter. After that I nursed for a year and a half and had no periods. After that I used condoms. Then I got into a serious relationship with a young bunny rabbit and realized that I should probably get serious about preventing pregnancy so I got the non-hormonal IUD. It wasn’t horrible, but having a little piece of copper in my body screwing up my egg’s ability to implant into my uterus was just weird so I got rid of it.

That was in March and that’s when I learned about family planning or fertility awareness.What freedom it was to know exactly when I was ovulating and when I wasn’t – to know when the egg traveled down my tubes and when it came to the end of its short life! I could sense all that and it was rad. I think it was at this point that I was truly Primal. (And to think I’d been doing the Paleo diet thing for six years already. There’s always so much more to learn!)

My period was very regular, coming every 29 days, occasionally 30. My mittelschmerz (the slight pain at the moment of ovulation in the middle of the cycle) was easy to detect and expect and so avoiding sex 4 or 5 days before its time was easy (well almost easy since ovulating makes for heightened sexual desire).

But then one month, for who knows what reason – maybe I was stressed, maybe it was because I had eaten starch that month (not something I generally do), maybe I was more or less active than usual, maybe it was anything – I ovulated two days early. It was a Wednesday. I thought it was sure strange to feel the tinge in my ovaries before Friday. Interesting, I thought. I made note of the fact that I’d have to be more careful with the span of days I went without sex.

But it was already too late.

I had had sex on Saturday and it was now Wednesday – I was ovulating 2 days earlier than expected. That little bastard sperm survived in me for five days until the egg was finally ready. Tough little dude. That’s good news.

So, 8 months of family planning ended in pregnancy – albeit fairly lax family planning. I could have charted better, of course. Lots of women get a bit lax with charting once their periods and ovulation appear like clockwork. But even the most regular of bodies can experience an irregular moment. We are imperfect creatures of an unpredictable nature. We are not machines, especially in a society where temptation and non-food abounds. We have a very different experience than our Primal ancestors. You spend two weeks indulging in sugar and your period will show it.

It’s not that I don’t believe in fertility awareness anymore. I still do. But I realize that the no-sex-window should probably be greater than 5 days. Let’s go with more like 8 just to be really safe.

I’m 8 weeks pregnant now. Due in August.