Alright, before my up-tight readers bite my head off, the fact of the matter is, those of us who are married have sex. It's natural, vitally important for marriage and the survival of mankind. As the demand for organic and "hormone-free" meat and dairy products continues to rise, I've always wondered if people will put together the fact that they are still putting their bodies at risk by ingesting/patching/injecting artificial hormones into their bodies to "suppress" or "avoid" the "medical condition" of "pregnancy" or "menstruation."
I know, that's a lot of quotation marks, but that's what big wig pharmaceutical companies and pro-birth control legislatures and advocates have now turned the natural processes of a woman's body into. Medical conditions.
The truth is, artificial birth controls are artificial hormones that are used to counteract what happens naturally in a woman's body (i.e. pregnancy or menstruation). Instead of rewriting what Dr. Axe has already explained, with full medical citations, I'm just going to embed his article "Is 'The Pill' Controlling YOU?" into this blog. This article explains what artificial birth control does to "prevent" pregnancy (and I use that term loosely since it does not always prevent pregnancy), the side-effects and natural solutions to family planning for the times in your life when you cannot have a child due to financial, emotional or health reasons. When used correctly, natural family planning (NFP) is 98-99% effective and doesn't have any adverse medical side-effects or reactions. It is a reliable and effective solution for couples who seriously need to avoid pregnancy, but also provides couples with the information needed to achieve pregnancy.
I get excited when talking about natural family planning, and it's not because I'm obsessed with sex. NFP is one of the ways that I can see on a daily basis how God truly has created my body to work in such interconnected ways, but yet keeps me in awe that my husband and I can play a role in understanding those complexities through the simplicity of learning NFP. I know my body better now than ever before, especially since I understand why I'm so hormonal certain times of the month!
The reason why I am an advocate of NFP goes beyond the physical, moral or medical reasons, although those were enough to convince us to use it for our marriage. My parents were divorced, remarried to others and both divorced again. I
knew when I got married that I wanted all I could get on our side, I
wanted until death do us part. Married couples who use NFP only have a 4% divorce rate! Why? Lots of reasons, but the most important is that it fosters self-control and open and sincere, even though sometimes difficult, communication about an extremely important part of marriage. And since two of the top five reasons for divorce are problems with communication and sex, NFP helps. A lot.
If you are for organic and hormone-free meats and you haven't heard of or checked out NFP yet, you're really going to love it! Your body won't regret it in the long run.
