“You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb. I praise you, because I am wonderfully made…” (Psalm 139:13-14a)

I have had my fair share of struggle with in feminine identity. Between personal feelings of not fitting in my own skin, cultural friction to gender roles, stereotyping of what it means to be a woman, and comparison to others, I felt challenged to understand how and why God made me the way that I am.

It wasn’t until I began to learn about the “Feminine Genius” (a term coined by the late Great Pope St. John Paul II) and Fertility Awareness that some of the puzzle pieces began to fit into a coherent image.

In attempts to stay on topic, I will focus on Fertility Awareness in this post and save my reflections on the Feminine Genius for another.

Fertility Awareness

How I discovered it…

Like most teenage girls, as a response to my irregular periods and other issues relating to my cycle, I was prescribed and used the pill for the majority of high school and into college.

Around the age of 20, I read the book Life Giving Love by Kimberly Hahn. I am not “a reader”, I labor from page to page; but this book had me hooked from beginning to end. I read it in about a week. This text sparked a tremendous adventure in my personal faith journey and my dating life (and future marriage) by influencing my understanding of femininity, feminism, and female health. Inspired by the connection of God’s design for men and women, particularly their biology and spirituality, well detailed in St. John Paul the Great’s work of The Theology of the Body, and further summarized in Hahn’s book, I began my quest to understand why God made me, a woman, this way.

In response to one of the chapters, I made the personal decision to end my use of contraception. Aside from some of the side effects that I had been putting up with, my main purpose for the choice was to attempt to get to the root of the health concerns surrounding my cycle.

Not long after removing the pill from my daily routine did I wind up in the hospital, further motivating my need for real answers to my pains and cycle issues.

After some further digging into the recourses shared in Hahn’s book, I connected with a local couple who supported young women and couples through prayer and education (and boy is this also a story for another time!), a Catholic NaPro Technology gynecologist, and a Creighton Model NFP Instructor.

This journey had such a profound personal and medical impact on my life that I felt confident of the need to share my story as well as what I continue to learn with others. Women (and men) deserve to know that they have been wonderfully made.

What is it?

What I learned from this team has been invaluable: the practice of Fertility Awareness. To summarize, Fertility Awareness is the studying of a woman’s natural biomarkers to determine the times in her cycles (regular or irregularly timed) to identify windows of fertility and infertility.

I learned that my body communicates the hormonal shifts of estrogen and progesterone (as well as peaks in Luteinizing Hormone (lH) and Follicle-Stimulizing Hormone (FSH)) through changes in basal body temperature synchronous with the secretion and changes of cervical mucus. While a male is always fertile, a woman is only fertile just prior, at the time of, and just after ovulation. Regardless of the length of time between menstruation, ovulation, and the next appearance of menstruation, a woman’s body will begin to show these signs as ovulation approaches and cease to show these signs soon afterwards.

These ebbs and flows of hormone changes each serve a uniquely wonderful purpose in menstruation, follicle growth, ovulation, building of uterine lining, maintenance of that lining, and potentially the protection of newly formed life.

What does that mean for a woman’s health?

Based on the timing of these fertile signs, the length of time within each phase of her cycle, and the quality of these signatures, a trained doctor can identify healthy cycles as well as pin point areas within a cycle that may be poorly effected by imbalanced hormones, diet, stress, etc.

An “irregular” cycle (a cycle longer or shorter than 26-30 days), within itself, is not an immediate indicator of concern; the length of menstruation, pre-ovulatory, ovulatory, and post-ovulatory phases are what communicate health and imbalance.

Using that information determined by the charted (documented or tracked) information about temperature and mucus along with well-timed bloodwork, a NaPro doctor can more accurately diagnose a female health problem and in turn supplement with specific, bioidentical hormones during those specified to those times of imbalance.

In this discovery, I felt much more confident and at peace with my decision to end my use of contraception in order to determine that I not only struggled with PCOS, but more specifically at the time, anovulatory cycles due to poor LH and FSH and low progesterone.

In my own journey with Fertility Awareness, prior to marriage, I was able to chart my cycles and supplement with quarterly progesterone.

How are Fertility Awareness and Natural Family Planning linked?

Fertility Awareness, as described above, is a system that any female can use to accurately track her cycles in order to gain predictability for her periods and better understand her hormone shifts.

Within marriage, a couple can further use these signs of fertility and infertility to engage in or abstain from sex to conceive or avoid conception. This discernment and action is known as Natural Family Planning (NFP).

If, in practicing Fertility Awareness, a woman has been able to notice irregularities, she can then work with a NaPro Technology doctor to diagnose the irregularities and better address infertility in hopes of health conception without the use of IUI and IVF as a first resort by supplementing the specific hormone issues they’ve identified.

How does Fertility Awareness connect to femininity?

We need to be honest about the wounds surrounding femininity that we may be projecting onto ourselves and others. Our culture can leave us striving for impossible goals and working to juggle too many roles just to prove the worth of women. We can lose the beautify of the genuine feminine identity in the filtered life we scroll through in order to keep up with all of the varying societal expectations for women. We may even be tempted to resent a woman’s fertility and see it as a hindrance to achieving our goals. How difficult it must be to detest within yourself such a vital part of what makes you, you. Understanding Fertility Awareness can begin the process of healing our misunderstandings and lessening our burdens. But this healing won’t be immediate, healing is a journey.

In discovering and understanding more about how my body functions, accompanied by researching the particular reasons for each function, I was in awe of how intricately the female body was created with purpose and finesse. Each part of what makes me a woman has a uniquely beautiful function that doesn’t need to remain a mystery to me. I am able to intimately interact with my womanhood through listening and communicating with my body and therefore make decisions for my life.

With so much is happening within the woman, it was clear to me how creatively God designed the female body. And He allows me insight and participation in that design!

Fiat. - Monica

Resources:

Fertility Awareness Methods: https://ccli.org/ and https://www.creightonmodel.com/

NaPro Technology Genecology: https://www.naprotechnology.com/

Video detailing Life Giving Love by Kimberly Hahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=TGuJLd81wYQ