Megan Faller, 39, of Menofee, Calif., first heard about fertility awareness in her early 20s from her then-boyfriend.
Growing up non-Catholic, her knowledge of women’s health and fertility primarily came from teen magazines like Seventeen. So when her boyfriend turned to her one day during lunch and asked, “What do you think about natural family planning?” Megan responded: “I literally have no idea what you’re asking me. I’ve never heard of this!”
When he described what he knew about observing signs in a woman’s body to determine her fertile and infertile times, Megan was interested but wondered, “If a woman could really do that, wouldn’t someone have told me? Wouldn’t I know?”
Little did she know, his question sparked a journey that would lead Megan to deeper and deeper discovery – knowledge that would become a cornerstone of her conversion to Catholicism, her method of family planning and her life’s work. Now a mom of four, it is hard to understate the impact of encountering fertility awareness.
The first step: to reverse the messaging from all those secular magazines. This, it turned out, was a welcome rearrangement of thought.
“Our culture told me that my cycle and its life-creating nature was a burden that could be manipulated to fit my desired end,” Megan said. “It wasn’t worth knowing or understanding. It was designed to work against me, to present a multitude of problems and roadblocks to my success. My body was bad. The work-arounds – contraception, sterilization, artificial reproductive technologies – existed to save me.”
This is not the case, she came to see. “As I began to know and learn more about my body and cycle, I realized my body and its natural design are good. And my greater appreciation for the goodness and nature of my body led to the desire to support its natural state – to create more harmony, to allow it to function as intended and to desire more good to flow from it: full giving of self, creativity, connection. When compared to the products and ideologies that I had been sold, suddenly the work-arounds quickly lost their appeal.”
Megan converted to Catholicism and, three years after being introduced to fertility awareness methods, learned natural family planning during marriage prep. As she and her fiancé studied the sympto-thermal method, she found she had more questions from her charting than the volunteer instructors could provide. The church’s probation on in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technology procedures remained a big question for her.
Then one day she heard a program on Catholic radio about the Creighton method of NFP and NaProTechnology. It answered her question about the church’s response to infertility – and compelled her to go further. She became a Creighton Method instructor and taught many years.
Life was busy, teaching school in a stressful environment while dealing with an autoimmune issue.
“It seemed like each month there were times when everything was falling apart,” she recalled.
Megan began researching a more sustainable self-care routine, which led to interesting advice: a woman should rest during her period. The idea made sense, so she tried it, laying low for several days while menstruating. When her period was done, she found herself more energized moving forward. She explored the idea more and discovered how to maximize its flip side — leaning into those parts of the month when things seemed to happen more easily. Ultimately, she founded a program to share this life-changing wisdom, The Aligned Cycle course, empowering women to learn their cycles and leverage that knowledge to enhance their work.
“Now I use my cycle to plan my schedule so I can enjoy more flow and ease in my work, and I help other female entrepreneurs to do the same,” she said.
‘Not mumbo-jumbo’
Megan is one of many women who have been surprised by the power of fertility awareness methods.
Take Cassie Moriarty, 32, of Bloomfield, N.J., who, like Megan, also heard about fertility awareness in her early 20s from her now-husband. Growing up, MTV, The Hills, Laguna Beach, and other TV shows were her primary source for information on sex and relationships. When her then-boyfriend, who had heard of NFP in high school, broached the subject of using it in their marriage, she was not receptive at all.
“I just didn’t believe in it. I had it mixed up with the rhythm method,” Cassie said. “But then I kind of went behind his back and did some research.” When she read Toni Weschler’s women’s health manual “Taking Charge of Your Fertility,” she began to think that maybe there was something to this. “Maybe it’s not mumbo-jumbo.”
Then there’s Abby Schmid, 31, a youth minister who, while growing up in Dayton, Ohio heard about NFP because her parents used the sympto-thermal method. But she was only aware of it being used to avoid or achieve pregnancy in the context of marriage. However, she did become familiar with the birth control pill when she was put on it at age 11 or 12 for ovarian cysts and painful periods.
While the pill improved her menstrual symptoms somewhat, after six months the doctor switched pill brands because “I didn’t like how it made me feel [overall],” Abby said. “But on the new brand I vomited for three days straight.”
Her and her mom decided she should stop the pill, and she just put up with period problems for years. Time and again the only treatment option she was offered was hormonal birth control. Whenever she visited her doctor and reported her symptoms she was repeatedly asked, “Well, are you trying to get pregnant? Because if you’re not, it doesn’t really matter.” Abby felt as if the doctor wasn’t taking her symptoms seriously enough to do anything beyond just writing a prescription.
A happy discovery
Then, around five years ago, Abby met Emily Vork Young, another woman with a history of similar reproductive issues but who had found answers by working with a doctor trained in something called NaProTechnology, the reproductive science arm of the Creighton Method, a fertility awareness method. After doing some research, it wasn’t long before Abby, too, sought out a NaPro doctor and was subsequently diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), low progesterone, and insulin resistance.
For the first time, “I felt like a person being taken seriously and not like a problem to be pushed aside.”
Emily, 28, from Cincinnati, Ohio, has been on a similar path. She learned of fertility awareness methods while converting to Catholicism during college. A friend in her Catholic campus ministry group heard that Emily suffered from severe thyroid problems and encouraged her to chart her cycle because “all hormones are related.”
Looking back, Emily remembers thinking, “I was really open to [FAMs]. I was wanting answers because a lot of the doctors that I’d seen didn’t have any answers….I was ready to try anything.”
Mind-blowing info
Then there’s Sarah Denny, PhD, a 34-year-old bioethicist, professor and speaker from New Orleans, La., who was introduced to theology of the body in her teens. A few years later a friend returned from attending a NaPro conference and told her in no uncertain terms: “I know what you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life!” and described NaPro as “theology of the body meets medicine.”
Not long after that, a coworker at the women’s health center where Sarah was working texted an invitation to a presentation happening the next day to learn chart her cycle. Sarah jumped at the opportunity.
She has never forgotten the Creighton Method intro session PowerPoint slide that changed everything for her. It showed a microscopic photo of estrogen-produced mucus – which is secreted during a woman’s fertile time leading up to ovulation. The mucus reminded her of a connected interstate system, with “channels” that served to help sperm move up to the egg that was soon to be released. This estrogen-produced mucus picture appeared side-by-side a picture of progesterone-produced mucus, which is secreted during the infertile second half of the fertility cycle.
“It looked like a brick wall, impenetrable to sperm,” Sarah said. “Wow, that is so cool!”
It was an aha moment for her, a memorable awareness of the amazingly intricate and beautiful design God created in the female body. And each of these women, who all learned of fertility awareness in different ways and at different times, had the same reaction to what they learned: They had to tell others.
Spreading the word
Like Megan, these women were compelled to share the power of FAM. Cassie went off the mini-pill and went on to become “that annoying person at the party” who brought up FAMs to everyone she met. She learned the Billings Ovulation Method, the Creighton Method, the sympto thermal nethod and FEMM! She now teaches multiple methods and works as a lactation consultant.
Abby’s reaction to her Creighton Method intro session was: “I can’t believe my body does all of those different things! …The attention to detail and the way that everything is connected, how could I not be created by a good God?” Through NaPro she was introduced to a deeper culture that affirms the goodness of the human person and of how our bodies work, and how when they aren’t working correctly there are ways to get help for that.
“So many women don’t know what’s normal or what’s not normal when it comes to their cycles, and I found out ‘Oh, I’m not supposed to have debilitating periods!’” she said. She became convicted that “other women need to know about this!”
Meanwhile, Emily found that learning the Creighton Method and working with a NaPro-trained doctor led her to become a Creighton Method instructor herself. Then, she went on to found New Eve Foundation (NEF), “a Catholic non-profit apostolate seeking to bring women to an encounter with Christ through the truth, beauty and goodness of their femininity” that incorporates both cycle charting and catechetical accompaniment for single women. Abby became New Eve Foundation’s Director of Retreats and Outreach, and both she and Emily, NEF’s Executive Director, are training to become FEMM instructors.
After her “that’s so cool!” moment during her charting intro session, Sarah committed to one day teaching other women. She began teaching the Creighton Method at age 24 and is now also undergoing FEMM training while she crafts a fertility awareness-focused sex education curriculum. She’s presented on fertility awareness to friends, prayer groups, LifeTeen missionaries, seminarians, medical students and, more recently, moms and young daughters.
The recurring question
Each of these women hear the same question from their now clients that they themselves had when they learned of fertility awareness methods: “Why did no one tell me this?”
“Why do women not know this?” Megan asked, “Because they should.”
Her Creighton clients asked her, “Why is this a secret?”
They consistently experience both awe for their bodies and their ability to understand their cycles, and “frustration, maybe anger, at the lack of knowledge” or “misguided information” they received from past medical providers. She remembers one client who said, “I need to go home and call my mom because she’s had reproductive and cycle issues her whole life, and she doesn’t know any of this!”
Cassie’s fertility awareness clients similarly report feeling “duped or betrayed” that they’d never been taught how their own bodies worked, or were ever encouraged to seek root causes for common reproductive health issues like painful or irregular periods and heavy bleeding.
During the Creighton Method intro sessions she gives, Emily said that inevitably “when we get to the slide that talks about the different health implications that charting can uncover, they stop me and say ‘why haven’t I heard about this before?’”
Even among secular audiences, Sarah has found that fertility awareness has a place as our culture slowly comes to acknowledge the fallout from the sexual revolution and its rejection of the gift of women’s fertility. Frequently after presentations, Sarah hears, “Why don’t they teach this in medical school?” In her role as a Christian Ethics professor, she found that even students who were unfamiliar with Christian teaching were interested in learning more about “this reality that within our very bodies there’s a language that can be understood. As you learn to track your cycle, it’s like keeping a biological diary.”
An issue of justice
Each of these women are united in the belief that all women deserve to learn fertility awareness for health monitoring. Even among faithful Catholics, they see that too many do not know that ovulation — not menstruation — is the main event of the cycle, or that there are whole-body benefits of a healthy fertility cycle that impact bone, brain, breast, heart and immune health.
Learning about the natural hormonal patterns of the female body arguably needs to happen much sooner than three months before the wedding (as often occurs during marriage prep). Taking a crash course in female fertility, especially with the intention of quickly using that knowledge for pregnancy avoidance or achievement, can be unnecessarily stressful. In contrast, learning fertility awareness far in advance for the purpose of health monitoring — even during the teen or pre-teen years — can equip young women to enter marriage aware of the unique reproductive challenges they may face in conceiving or maintaining a pregnancy.
Abby has seen this lived out. She has been part of a young adult community with 17 other women over the years, and because of fertility awareness knowledge, several of them received accurate reproductive health diagnoses before marriage. With full knowledge of what their challenges might be, they could work to optimize their fertility and whole-body health.
But fertility awareness isn’t only for women called to marriage. Abby stressed: “Single women have every right to know how their body works just as much as married women. They’re going to be better married women or religious sisters or whatever they’re called to because they know physically how they are created, and that reveals something to them about who God is as well.”
The TOB tie-in
Emily is known to quip, “Fertility awareness and TOB go together like peanut butter and jelly!”
She elaborated: “Fertility awareness is a practical application of theology of the body. St. John Paul II speaks of the language of the body and how we’re not the authors of this language. Fertility awareness teaches us to take the time to read the signs that our body gives us about our fertility, and when we do we can come into contact — sometimes very, very closely— with the creation that God has made and the goodness of our bodies.”
She continued: “Every single woman should have the opportunity to be evangelized through fertility appreciation. It’s an avenue for evangelization that is largely untapped. Not only are there so many health benefits and marriage benefits, like a stronger relationship with our spouse, but our relationship with God can also be enriched.”
Cassie observed that whereas porn and masturbation are “a given” in secular society’s view of relationships, through TOB she learned “it doesn’t have to be that way. [The main concepts of TOB] felt very safe to me and very honoring of women’s bodies and our minds and our hearts.”
The New Eve Foundation’s approach regarding TOB is this: “We proclaim the Gospel by first proclaiming ‘this is the goodness of who you are’” by teaching them fertility awareness, and then inviting them deeper, saying ‘Imagine how good the Person who made you is.’” Abby emphasizes to the women that “You are a body and a soul and both are good, and we’re going to talk about both of those.”
That statement echoes Megan’s discovery years ago: our bodies are good. Sarah is quick to share the same message, also framing it in theology of the body.
“The glory of TOB is that it brings to our awareness the gift of woman and man in our creation,” she said. “We are very good. And in that reality, every single part of our humanity and our human experience is good, is sacred, and has the potential to image God back to the rest of the world and creation. In a particular way, fertility awareness gives to a woman — and also to men — an insight into the inner experience of woman. It gives her the very tools to understand the language that her unique body, and so her unique personhood, is speaking. And we need more of that today.”
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Find your method
There’s a FAM for every woman and lifestyle…yes, even for irregular cycles!
Mucus-only Methods methods rely exclusively on cervical mucus observations.
Symptothermal Methods combine cervical mucus observations with basal body temperature (BBT) readings and, optionally, cervical position checks.
Sympto-hormonal Methods combine cervical mucus observations with reproductive hormone urinary metabolite readings using a ClearBlue Fertility Monitor, Mira Monitor, etc.
Which FAM is right for you?
Take a quick, 12-question quiz to find out at https://naturalwomanhood.org/learning-materials/quiz/.