The Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception is not something I’m inclined to get on a soapbox about. But I do believe that women should be given accurate information about the effectiveness of natural methods of family planning, because, no matter one’s religious beliefs, they can provide a valuable set of options, especially for women who do not wish to take artificial hormones, or even have had negative reactions to them. (Incidental fact: the secular Facebook group “Fertility Awareness Method of Birth Control” has 10,363 members, which is more than the 9,112 at “Natural Family Planning.)
Last November, I pointed out that the CDC’s of-repeated statistic that NFP has a failure rate of 24%, is based on unplanned pregnancies among women who self-reported using any natural method, but, in fact, 7 out of 8 of them self-reported using “calendar rhythm,” and, given that “calendar rhythm” is generally not taught (with the exception of a method called CycleBeads), these women were most likely making it up themselves.
In contrast, the WHO’s statistics on family planning effectiveness rates report a failure rate of 2% for the symptothermal method. (Added: that’s user effectiveness, not “perfect use” rate. In other words, the 2% takes into account the failures of users in applying the rules as well as pregnancies when rules are followed to the letter. However, this rate is based on a secular NFP study, in which women for whom the method was unsatisfactory felt free to drop out and try something else, though it seems to me they did have a high rate of continuation.)
If you had nothing else to go on but the CDC, you’d look at the 24% rate and run far, far away.
Now there’s a petition, by the group Natural Womanhood. They’re collecting signatures to take to the CDC to ask them to correct their statistics to provide women with an accurate picture of effectiveness rates. For the sake of women seeking alternate, non-hormonal/chemical methods, please sign this petition. And I say that as someone who usually hates petitions, and thinks the idea of gathering names online is half-scam, half waste-of-time.
To be sure, the site that’s sponsoring the petition is an NFP-teaching site, but, so far as I can tell, there is no religious agenda, solely a women’s health agenda. And the petition itself is simply a call for accuracy in information that’s being given to women, as opposed to the current approach of hiding behind a statistical method to justify telling women that NFP is useless and they need to use chemicals — which is itself an agenda of distrusting women to be able to use a method requiring diligence and effort.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinfoilraccoon/91075158; Creative Commons 2.0 license
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