natural family planning Archives - Fertility Science Institute

Healing Fertility Naturally

In the 1960s the popular use of the hormonal birth control pill prompted the Catholic Church to respond with the encyclical of Humanae Vitae. It explained the moral stance and alternatives for family planning. Over 60 years later, couples and families are faced with the moral question about IVF and fertility treatments. Considering recent government…

Is NFP Healthy For Marriage?

We all know about the health benefits of using NFP in comparison to contraceptives. What’s perhaps more important are the benefits using NFP brings to your marriage relationship. I recently reviewed the scientific literature on the impact of NFP and contraceptives on marriage relationships. The bottom line: NFP is good for your marriage health. Some…

Charting in the First Year

Charting in the first year of marriage as a couple can be tricky. On top of combining two lives into one, you now also get to start using NFP and charting ‘for real’ together. It’s a great time for the husband to take over inputting the data onto the chart or app each day. The…

Difficulties Diagnosing Hypothyroidism

The thyroid is a small, butterfly-shaped gland located at the base of the neck, just below the Adam’s apple. The thyroid gland makes two main hormones: thyroxine (T-4) and triiodothyronine (T-3). Hypothyroidism happens when the thyroid gland doesn’t make enough hormones.  In Marilyn Shannon’s book Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition, she lists signs of low thyroid…

NFP: Backed by Solid Science

For most people learning NFP is a time of observing, recording, and trying to interpret so they can understand when they are fertile and when they are not. But NFP, or more accurately living the NFP lifestyle, is much more than observing fertility changes; it impacts our daily lives in ways that most of us…

Finally…CDC’s FABM Numbers Change

Happily, the CDC now reports that “fertility awareness-based methods…failure rates vary across the methods.” They provide a figure of 2 percent to 23 percent.

NBC Misreports Family Planning Statistics

To be fair, all of these sources rightly draw from the CDC, which relies on one very low-quality study to generate its numbers, and then blindly applies that number (the 24 in 100 statistic that Spector uses) to the entire gamut of natural methods.