NFP Can Work With Irregular Cycles
navigating the tricky times
Posted by Sara Fox Peterson
in Marriage
on Monday, September 28, 2009 12:00 PM
Unusually long, short or irregular cycles or amenorrhea (the absence of cycles) make NFP more challenging. But you already knew that, right?
Fortunately NFP does work just fine, regardless of how irregular your cycles are or whether you even have cycles, and it even works without requiring you to abstain four weeks out of the month.
Normal cycles can be anywhere from about 25 to 40 days long and may vary in length by 5 or 6 days from cycle to cycle. So, for example, even your cycles are sometimes 26 days and sometimes 28 days and sometimes 30 days long, that is still considered normal and regular. It’s also not usually a cause for concern to have a single abnormally long or short cycle once or twice a year. The human body simply isn’t a machine and some variation in how fertility unfolds is to be expected.
Truly abnormal cycles can have many causes. The most common, and times when abnormal cycles are actually perfectly normal, are during breastfeeding and in the last few years before a woman enters menopause. Disorders of the thyroid, adrenals, pituitary or glucose metabolism (as in PCOS) can cause abnormally long or irregular cycles as can some medications (including some antidepressants).
If you are too young to be approaching menopause and are not breastfeeding, but still have persistently abnormal cycles it is important to find a doctor who is willing to determine why because many of the conditions that underlie abnormal cycles can have serious long-term health consequences.
Birth control pills do not ‘regulate’ a woman’s cycle. They simply eliminate her cycles altogether by supplying her body with a constant supply of artificial hormones (rather than the varying levels of hormones that occur throughout a normal cycle) and cause to her bleed at regular intervals when she takes the placebo pills that start each pack and the hormones are withdrawn.
Even worse, birth control pills do nothing to diagnose or treat whatever is causing cycle irregularity and so leave women walking around with any number of untreated hormonal disorders. Every woman deserves better medical care than that! (Read more on the overuse of the pill from Dr. Mary Martin, OB/Gyn.)
Most disucssions of NFP and irregular cycles focus on how to avoid pregnancy, but the information that can be obtained from an accurate NFP chart can be invaluable for couples who are having difficulty achieving pregnancy. As with the overuse of the pill, there is the tendency to jump in and treat infertility with drugs and procedures (including those that are always immoral like IVF) without taking the time to understand where the problem lies.
An evaluation of the effectiveness of the Billings Method for sub-fertile couples attempting to achieve pregnancy found that a whopping 78% conceived in an average of less than 5 months (these couples had, on average, been trying to conceive for 15 months before learning NFP), including 37 who had previously attempted artificial insemination and/or IVF without success, simply by learning the Billings Method. Similarly, the Pope Paul VI Institute’s NaProTechnology combines the Creighton Model of NFP with morally acceptable medical treatments for infertility and achieves much higher success rates than result from the use of IVF for similar conditions.
Tomorrow, more on postpartum NFP.
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