Rhythm Method, NFP?

[AlexPetrosPio]

My mom (a cradle Catholic who left the Church to become a Evangelical) was making fun of a family she normal calls “friend” because the family is now pregnant with baby Number 10. She joked, saying that the Rhythm Method “obviously” doesn’t work, and that they should try something that does, implying artificial contraception. (Ironically, being a divorced woman herself from an annulled marriage using artificial contraception, she still doesn’t see the truth of Humanea Vitea.)

My question: I know that I’ve read somewhere that NFP and the Rhythm Method are different, but as I am a 20 year old male living with Franciscans, I obviously don’t have the expertise to know the difference. So, to explain to my mother, what is the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method?

 

[Gordon_Sims]

I believe NFP is symptom-based, relying on a woman’s actual body rhythms and identifiable signs to determine when she is fertile; whereas the rhythm method is strictly time-based. You look at when she usually has her period and determine the fertile periods based on that. My wife and I have not yet started using NFP. Due to improper guidance from family, friends and a couple priests, we used contraception for years. When we gave that up, we used the rhythm method, but only because we’d heard how unreliable it was and we were hoping for at least that same level of unreliability for us. That being said, it took us close to two years to get pregnant using it, and we did an intentionally bad job of following it; so, for us at least, its unreliability was highly overrated.

 

[SummerSmiles]

The rhythm method relies on keeping track of a woman’s cycles on the calendar. It assumes that the woman will always have a cycle that is the same length. So, by looking at a woman’s history of when she had her periods, you could predict when the next one was and when she would be fertile or infertile based on that. It is highly unreliable. Many factors can mess with a woman’s cycle to delay ovulation.

NFP methods today like Creighton, Billings, and STM, look at a woman’s day to day symptoms. Every day a woman will chart her symptoms. When she notices changes in things like cervical mucus consistency, she can tell if she is entering a fertile time in her cycle. She can get a good idea of when she ovulates, and then knows (generally) when to expect her next period based on that. So even if a woman’s cycle is not predictable on a calendar, she can still figure out what her body is doing based on the symptoms she observes each day.

 

[Spencerian]

My mom (a cradle Catholic who left the Church to become a Evangelical) was making fun of a family she normal calls “friend” because the family is now pregnant with baby Number 10. She joked, saying that the Rhythm Method “obviously” doesn’t work, and that they should try something that does, implying artificial contraception. (Ironically, being a divorced woman herself from an annulled marriage using artificial contraception, she still doesn’t see the truth of Humanea Vitea.)

My question: I know that I’ve read somewhere that NFP and the Rhythm Method are different, but as I am a 20 year old male living with Franciscans, I obviously don’t have the expertise to know the difference. So, to explain to my mother, what is the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method?

The old “rhythm method” tried to calculate fertile and infertile cycles based on a rather static pattern that assumed menstruation cycles were fairly constant. Any married man can tell you that women’s bodies change more dynamically than this.

Natural Family Planning differs in that couples use temperature or direct observations of a woman’s physical properties each day or so during a month to determine when she is or is not fertile, which allows couples to ensure time to space pregnancies while enjoying intimacy or know the precise windows for maximum fertility in order to conceive. It may very well be that your mother’s friend *wanted *to become pregnant, for proper use of NFP allows this with good results.

It should be noted that one type of NFP has a equal, if not greater effectiveness rate over the Pill, articleScience Daily, but without the *possible *health risks from such contraception drugs over time, including heart disease, stroke, and other problems that come from hormonal drugs (as with some types of steroids, like the drugs that some male athletes have used, with deadly consequences).


This article from the Priests for Life website gives more detail and differences about NFP.

 

[PaulGH]

My mom (a cradle Catholic who left the Church to become a Evangelical) was making fun of a family she normal calls “friend” because the family is now pregnant with baby Number 10. She joked, saying that the Rhythm Method “obviously” doesn’t work, and that they should try something that does, implying artificial contraception. (Ironically, being a divorced woman herself from an annulled marriage using artificial contraception, she still doesn’t see the truth of Humanea Vitea.)

My question: I know that I’ve read somewhere that NFP and the Rhythm Method are different, but as I am a 20 year old male living with Franciscans, I obviously don’t have the expertise to know the difference. So, to explain to my mother, what is the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method?

You already have some good answers on the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method. I would just add that the family with ten children is not necessarily evidence that NFP doesn’t work. It may just be that they are very open to life, and have not actively tried to avoid pregnancy. Or maybe they have used NFP to avoid pregnancy for short times only.

NFP is very effective for most couples if they follow the rules. But the way that NFP works, there is a pretty big incentive not to follow the rules. In other words, following the rules means abstaining during the woman’s fertile time, which is often difficult. So a couple who has only a moderately serious reason to avoid pregnancy may decide to take a risk in a certain month, rather than abstaining for the full time. This situation isn’t exactly an unplanned pregnancy or a method failure. It is more of “well, let’s just be less careful this month and see what happens – knowing that a new baby may be here in nine months.”

 

[SMHW]

My mom (a cradle Catholic who left the Church to become a Evangelical) was making fun of a family she normal calls “friend” because the family is now pregnant with baby Number 10. She joked, saying that the Rhythm Method “obviously” doesn’t work, and that they should try something that does, implying artificial contraception. (Ironically, being a divorced woman herself from an annulled marriage using artificial contraception, she still doesn’t see the truth of Humanea Vitea.)

My question: I know that I’ve read somewhere that NFP and the Rhythm Method are different, but as I am a 20 year old male living with Franciscans, I obviously don’t have the expertise to know the difference. So, to explain to my mother, what is the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method?

The Rhythm Method is the rather primitive and often inaccurate forerunner to NFP…

The Rhythm Method looks at the average length of a woman’s cycle, makes the assumption that a given woman will ALWAYS have that *same *cycle. From that the method tries to predict when a woman will be fertile so that a couple can abstain if trying to avoid pregnancy or engage in sexual relations if they are trying to conceive. Since the method relies on a somewhat faulty premise it has rather hit and miss reliability.

Natural Family Planning methods assume that each woman is different and that her cycles will not only be different from other women, but that they are going to differ from month to month. As such, the woman tracks her own specific signs that can p(name removed by moderator)oint when she “becomes fertile” in a given cycle and when she eventually ovulates. Since some women show fertile signs over a week before they actually ovulate and others have much shorter fertile periods, (and a given woman may have considerable variation from month to month), a couple who wishes to avoid or achieve pregnancy can still make a fairly accurate determination of when to have or when to avoid relations in a given month.

 

[SteveGC]

Many years ago, before I had heard of the Rhythm Method, I blushed pretty good at my wife’s OB/GYN when he suggested it.

LOL. I thought it referred to how you “perform” the conjugal act - i.e. if you use a certain “rhythm”, you’re more likely to have successful conception LOL.

 

[MomaMary8]

You already have some good answers on the difference between NFP and the Rhythm Method. I would just add that the family with ten children is not necessarily evidence that NFP doesn’t work. It may just be that they are very open to life, and have not actively tried to avoid pregnancy. Or maybe they have used NFP to avoid pregnancy for short times only.

."

This.

As a mother of ten who is open to the lives that God will grant me, I would suggest telling your mother to stop scoffing at their openness to life. There are actually some people that do not wish to limit the size of their family and have no valid reason to limit their family size and have no medical reason preventing them from having children. We are not a large group of people, but we do exist.

I’ll say a prayer for your mother that she may return to the church. It sounds like she has had some misconceptions taught to her.

 

[Kelfa28]

How about adding in the statistics that say NFP users tend to have larger families because they WANT a larger family and not because NFP doesn’t work.

Or the statistics that say NFP, when done correctly, is just as effective and sometimes more so then artificial birth control.

Or that couples who use NFP regularly have a very low divorce rate.

 

[PaulGH]

Many years ago, before I had heard of the Rhythm Method, I blushed pretty good at my wife’s OB/GYN when he suggested it.

LOL. I thought it referred to how you “perform” the conjugal act - i.e. if you use a certain “rhythm”, you’re more likely to have successful conception LOL.