Fertility Monitors

Fertility awareness (FA) refers to a set of practices used to determine the fertile and infertile phases of a woman's menstrual cycle. Fertility awareness methods may be used to avoid pregnancy, to achieve pregnancy, or as a way to monitor gynecological health. more...

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Terminology

Symptoms-based methods involve tracking one or more of the three primary fertility signs - basal body temperature, cervical mucus, and cervical position. Systems relying exclusively on cervical mucus include the Billings Ovulation Method, the Creighton Model, and the Two-Day Method. Symptothermal methods combine observations of BBT, cervical mucus, and sometimes cervical position. Calendar-based methods rely only on a history of cycle lengths. While the World Health Organization classifies both symptoms-based and calendar-based methods as "fertility awareness", some teachers of symptoms-based methods do not consider calendar-based methods to be fertility awareness.

Systems of fertility awareness may be referred to as fertility awareness-based methods (FAB methods); the term Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) refers specifically to the system taught by Toni Weschler. The term natural family planning" (NFP) is sometimes used to refer to any use of FA methods. However, NFP specifically refers to practices that are approved by the Roman Catholic Church: breastfeeding infertility, and periodic abstinence during fertile times. A method of FA may be used by NFP users to identify these fertile times.

Women who are breastfeeding a child and wish to avoid pregnancy may be able to practice the lactational amenorrhea method (LAM). LAM is distinct from fertility awareness, but because it also does not involve devices or chemicals, it is often presented alongside FA as a method of natural birth control.

History

It is not known exactly when it was first discovered that women have predictable periods of fertility and infertility. St. Augustine wrote about periodic abstinence to avoid pregnancy in the year 388 (the Manichaeans attempted to use this method to remain childfree, and Augustine condemned their use of periodic abstinence). One book states that periodic abstinence was recommended "by a few secular thinkers since the mid-nineteenth century," but the dominant force in the twentieth century development of observational methods was the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1905 Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, a Dutch gynecologist, showed that women only ovulate once per menstrual cycle. In the 1920s, Kyusaku Ogino, a Japanese gynecologist, and Hermann Knaus, from Austria, independently discovered that ovulation occurs about fourteen days before the next menstrual period. Ogino used his discovery to develop a formula for use in aiding infertile women time intercourse to achieve pregnancy. In 1930, John Smulders, Roman Catholic physician from the Netherlands, used this discovery to create a method for avoiding pregnancy. Smulders published his work with the Dutch Roman Catholic medical association, and this was the first formalized system for periodic abstinence - the Rhythm Method.

Read more at Wikipedia.org