Glimpse the “family planning” aisle at your local pharmacy, and you may get the impression that the phrase strictly refers to contraception, enhancement, or pleasure. This would be on par with the dictionary definition of the term, which is “the practice of controlling the number of children in a family and the intervals between their births, particularly by means of artificial contraception or voluntary sterilization,” and its secondary definition, “artificial contraception.” Whether you associate family planning with contraception or not, everyone can agree that family planning is ultimately about relationships, what we do in them and for them. Therefore, we should learn to view family planning as more than just deciding whether or not to get pregnant, and consider it in the full scope of its relational meaning.
More Than Just a Body
As each person is more than just a body, family planning should be more than just the physical aspects of fertility (integral as they are). It also involves your soul, mind, emotions, and other people, because choosing to have sex, choosing get pregnant or prevent pregnancy is always a relational choice made by two potentially fertile people and the person they can potentially create. This fertile reality stands regardless of whether you’re married, in a relationship, or outside of a relationship and is not limited to a pharmacy aisle nor a contraceptive mentality. Unfortunately, no small number of men and women are brought up to view sex and fertility as separable, severing sex from its fertile reality and the person from the body. Countless young women can’t imagine a sexual reality without the pill, viewing fertility as a threat to their personal autonomy. Their fear is not entirely misplaced – they know that their bodies are fearfully made to create new life, and that sex in its fullest sense can turn life as they know it upside down. Rather than fear the fullness of sex, they should be equipped to embrace it by learning how fertility works and how they can work with it – not against it – to live life to the fullest, on their own terms, in full acknowledgement of the power of their fertility.
Fertility Awareness for Women (and Men)
Luckily, there is an alternative to family planning called natural family planning, or fertility awareness-based methods (FABM’s), which young women can study and implement well before they’ve even started thinking about family planning per se. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, fertility awareness is “knowing and recognizing when the fertile time (when a woman can get pregnant) occurs in the menstrual cycle,” something that can be difficult for many women to adjust to after years of avoiding pregnancy. As one article put it, “you might think all it takes is one night without a condom, and poof — you’re with child. But it’s not always that easy.” The sooner a young woman observes her fertile signs without the regulation of artificial hormones and without the weightiness of sexual relationship, the sooner she can learn how to know intimately and work confidently with her own body in a personalized way. While FABM’s can be used as contraceptives, they generally do a better job than, say, hormonal contraceptives at empowering women to attend to the connection between sex, fertility, relationships, and new life. Furthermore, because FABM’s require men’s cooperation to abstain during fertile periods, they help men to become more appreciative of women’s physical bodies as well as their relational needs.
To Be or Not to Be “Child-Free”?
Acknowledging that women experience cyclical fertility related to their whole bodily health can also empower them to resist the either-or thinking popularized by the child-free movement, and to challenge its often anti-natalist assumptions. To be sure, not everyone wants to create a family of their own – but many women who would be otherwise open to having children in the future hear politicians, cultural commentators, and employers insist that true empowerment lies in the rejection of family relations and the embrace of individual identity. They have bought into the notion that family planning is black-and-white acceptance or rejection of pregnancy, rather than contention with the power of one’s fertility. A woman who uses FABM’s, however, need not view herself in opposition to others, or to her own body. She need not feel that her fertile life is a threat to her personal development. She gains the experience of listening to her body within the context of her whole life as well as the time to consider whether and with whom she wants to raise a family. She associates children with the gift of fertility through relationship, rather than with the optional products one acquires or disposes at will. She exists between childless and “child-full” conditions without feeling pressured to conform to either. She recognizes that “freedom from children” is no freedom at all when compared to that she feels living in the power of her procreative potential.
