Looking for natural birth control doesn’t need to be a struggle

This is a guest post by Aisha Mukooza

I started thinking about birth control options before I was sexually active. Everything I heard or learned about hormonal birth control sounded repulsive to me.

I hate taking any kind of medication, even when I’m ill, so the idea of taking a pill everyday, especially when I’m perfectly healthy, didn’t sit right with me. I knew all medication had side effects so I looked up hormonal birth control side effects and I couldn’t believe a lot of women use it everyday.

Anyway, I concluded that if I became sexually active, my partner and I would use condoms until the time came for baby making. I was fortunate enough to find a partner with the same mindset for birth control. We used condoms for about six months, give or take a month. We would have continued with our birth control as planned but condoms started burning him. We tried different brands to no avail. We were forced to start looking for other options. He suggested I get on the pill which I wasn’t having.

The pressure was intense during those few months; I was miserable. I almost contemplated breaking up, but figured I’d come into the same problems with the next partner.

I really loved him anyway, so I started researching the copper IUD, the only other known and trusted non-hormonal birth control. Unfortunately, the more I researched it, the more gruesome it seemed and the more determined I was to never put it anywhere near my body.

That’s when I started considering withdrawal (I knew about withdrawal but didn’t care much for it). I started looking up how to use it perfectly. I told my partner about it. He was very skeptical. Unlike most folks, I knew withdrawal worked so I encouraged him to get on board. We planned to use Plan B if anything happened while he perfected the art of withdrawing in time. He eventually did and we fell in love with withdrawal.

Though we liked withdrawal, I knew we wouldn’t use only withdrawal for the long term. So, one day, I decided to google natural birth control, thinking there no such thing but hoping that there was.

Somehow, I got stuck on the LadyComp (Which is a computerized device that records your body basal temperature and calculates the days you’re fertile or not).

It was the first thing I stumbled upon. Most of the reviewers recommended reading Taking Charge of your Fertility by Toni Weschler. I got the book and started reading and so began my journey with the fertility awareness method (or FAM).

I was amazed. I was enlightened and I was in pure awe. I wanted to start charting right away and I did. I discovered I didn’t need the LadyComp. Those things are expensive; I dodged a bullet. I’ve never looked back.

FAM was exactly what we needed because it would give us a break from withdrawal during my luteal phase (one of the naturally infertile parts of the cycle).

In my beginning months with FAM, cervical mucus was confusing and because my follicular phase temps and luteal phase temps were obviously distinct, I resorted to temping-only.

I use the Kindara app for charting so when they opened up a community and almost everyone who shared their chart observed their cervical mucus, I gave it another try. For some reason, in a just a cycle I was good at it. I guess Taking Charge of Your Fertility had way too many types of cervical mucus. Kindara made it easier for me to categorize via their knowledge base. Now I’m enjoying a no side-effects, hormonal free birth-control.

I’ve been successfully avoiding with FAM for two and half years while using withdrawal during my fertile window. Besides being a completely natural birth control method, I credit it with helping bring my partner and I closer together. We are now married.

Aisha Mukooza is 25 years old and lives in Virginia, USA. She moved from Uganda at 17 years of age. She is recently married and loves listening to audio books and everything involving Fertility Awareness. She works as a certified phlebotomist at a hospital.