Sexual awareness, good knowledge of how the body works and plenty of involvement in the family life are necessary for a couple to successfully practice natural family planning. This kind of birth control is not easy, and both partners share the duty of getting information. The same methods used for the prevention of pregnancy can also be applied the other way round, when the couple is trying to conceive. Among the most common options here we can mention tests for ovulation, the monitoring of the cervical mucus, the basal temperature method, the standard days method, and even computer fertility tests and charts.
Natural family planning comes cheap and it is not difficult to understand and put into practice. Yet, it requires good communication with the life partner as well as willingness to accept the eventual limitations of the method. There are around ten days every month when sexual intercourse without birth control may result in pregnancy. You should either abstain or use some other birth control method. Condoms will prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, while natural family planning only works for pregnancy prevention.
It is important for the woman to interpret her fertility daily, so that natural family planning be effective. Moreover, it is not advisable to choose natural birth control methods when you know that you don’t want a child, and the possibility of getting pregnant seems devastating. Therefore, if a possible pregnancy would not be such a disaster for you, natural family planning could be taken more lightly. The effectiveness of the method can only be appreciated depending on how accurate the woman is with her interpretation.
Statistics indicate that in case of perfect usage, the effectiveness of natural family planning ranges between 95% and 98%, which is actually higher than that of oral contraceptives. Yet, if we are to discuss not the perfect user but the average user, the efficiency rate drops somewhere between 75% and 88%. These data are closer to reality because few people who use natural family planning, actually follow all the rules correctly.
Who relies on natural family planning? Such birth control options enjoy a higher popularity within some communities because of some religious or cultural beliefs. There are families that won’t mind conceiving and therefore take little care of birth control. In fact, for lots of people who try natural family planning, a baby would not be a mistake or a problem.