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I know the news cycle moves fast but it's taken me a week to get my luteal thoughts together to respond to the NYT article on FAM that's been floating around - MAHA-Fueled Rise of Natural Family Planning​

In the meantime I’ve been watching the reactions from secular educators, medical providers and longtime charters and have finally got the words to talk about why the secular FABM community is pissed.

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Secular fertility awareness isn’t new

One thing the article gets wrong right out of the gate is the implied timeline.

Catholic NFP absolutely predates secular FAM. But secular educators have been out here teaching science without purity rhetoric long before people started talking about MAHA.

We were here and have been here before this recent wave of conservative natural femininity content.

And we’ve been teaching people how to understand their cycles using data and discernment — not dogma — since long before it became cool to talk about cycles online.

But you’d never know that from the article because the NYT piece treats FAM like a sudden phenomenon born from one political movement or only for Catholics.

Journalists still cannot talk about birth control without panicking

Listennnnnnn I am here for the media and have mad respect for journalists but I have yet to read one news article that leaves room for nuance when it comes to fertility awareness.

It always goes something like this: birth control has risks, but the benefit outweighs those risks, so we won't say anything negative about hormonal birth control whatsoever.

And look I GET why they do it. From a public health perspective, it’s dangerous to tell the entire population to quit the pill cold turkey.

But to diminish side effects or imply that women don't experience them at all is patronizing. The article says:

"Some women do experience side effects from hormonal birth control, reporting changes in mood, stress levels, and other reactions. Still, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — which has denounced claims about harms caused by the medication as “dangerous” misinformation — continues to recommend a wide variety of hormonal methods..."

Yes, hormonal birth control is safe. Yes, for many people, the benefits far outweigh the risks.

And also: people deserve informed consent. We are allowed to learn about our bodies no matter what method we choose and it doesn't mean we're anti-medication if we choose to not be on birth control.

The journalist went to one NFP class and treated it like the standard

This might be my biggest frustration: the entire article hinges on a class taught by someone who openly says:

“Contraception interrupts the nature of sex…”

And yet it's framed as if this class is representative of the entire fertility awareness field.

This is what happens when you sample one narrow ideology and generalize it to everyone.

The Birth Control Acceptability Scale

Every single person choosing birth control is doing a calculus of tradeoffs.

Unfortunately there is no perfect option.

We all choose our method based on what’s tolerabl and what’s right for our lives at that moment.

Someone might use:

the pill for five years, switch to FAM, go back to hormones, use condoms all cycle long, and change it all after a planned pregnancy.

People think fertility awareness advocates want to eliminate hormonal birth control (we don't)

Not enough people talk about how it doesn't need to be all-or-nothing with birth control.

And this is why articles like this piss me off

Because instead of:

interviewing and quoting secular educators

acknowledging decades of research

highlighting varied user experiences

or addressing systemic medical issues

The NYT took the road of conservatives using natural family planning as a political tool.

That movement exists, but it isn't the entire story.

And we’re tired of having to explain that fertility awareness ≠ religious ideology.

In better and brighter news, this is the final day to get your Feeling Luteal Crewneck - for when you're feeling extremely luteal, or extremely fired up about the media portrayal of FABMs.

​You can get it here until midnight tonight.

Nat

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