Taking Birth control pill but not for contraceptive purposes?

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AmberGordinier

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Hello,
I am new to all this, currently in the process of converting to Catholocism. I agree with the Church’s teachings regarding birth control of any sort, but I have small problem.

My husband and I have three children, two of them just babies. I have been undergoing treatment for severe post-partum depression & anxiety. My husband has a very high stress job and is also up against a deadline to compete his Bachelors Degree. We are currently practicing NFP, but I have very irregular cycles. We are also both on medication for depression & anxiety. Obviously, all these factors have affected our time for, ability to and desire for sexual activity.

Thankfully, we have a short vacation coming up (it’s been planned for months) but it’s looking more & more as though I may be on my period during this time. It’s very disappointing!!!
My question is, would it be acceptable for me to take birth control pills only for the next couple of weeks in attempt to hold off my period until after our vacation? I do not wish to stay on them, we are open to new life, but this special time of relaxation and intimacy has been planned as way to try and strengthen or marriage and reconnect with one another.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thank you
 
Let me see if I understand you. You think you’re going to ovulate right before the vacation, and then have your period during the vacation. You want to take the pills to fool your body into thinking you’re pregnant, but you wouldn’t be having intercourse while on the pills (or you wouldn’t even be asking this question, I’d think). You’re hoping that your body’s response of menstruation after discontinuing the pills will be sufficiently delayed so that you can have sex on vacation while neither ovulating nor menstruating…that is, you want to chemically lengthen the infertile period that occurs between ovulation and menstuation to fit your vacation plans.

I can see what you’re getting at, I think you mean well, but I don’t think that works. You’re attempting to chemically extend your infertile time so that you can have sex when it suits you without getting pregnant. That’s contraceptive, because putting off menstruation by this means also means putting off ovulation. Even more to the point, I don’t think you can know that it would work. Hormonal contraceptives don’t turn fertility on and off so predictably as that.

You can use the vacation to work on the things that are causing depression and anxiety that are getting in the way of having the time and ability to have a normal sex life. That does require intimate intercouse, but it doesn’t require sexual intercourse.

Having said that, this is an odd sort of twist on contraception. I’m interested to hear what take others have on it.
 
Actually, EasterJoy, what she is suggesting does work. Many ob/gyns will give a short dose of BCPs to delay a period to accommodate vacation plans. I’ve known of many cases such as that described here. I don’t know whether it’s permissible as far as Catholic teaching goes. But the mechanism does work to help ensure a period-free vacation.
 
EasterJoy said:
I can see what you’re getting at, I think you mean well, but I don’t think that works. You’re attempting to chemically extend your infertile time so that you can have sex when it suits you without getting pregnant. That’s contraceptive, because putting off menstruation by this means also means putting off ovulation. Even more to the point, I don’t think you can know that it would work. Hormonal contraceptives don’t turn fertility on and off so predictably as that.
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I agree with this. Even if you’re not “intending” to contracept, you would still be doing so. You’d have to take them during your vacation, right? You wouldn’t be taking the pill for a medical reason, you’d be doing it for your own convenience, and it would prevent you from ovulating. Doesn’t seem licit to me.

No to mention, it might not work out the way you hope. Different people will react in different ways of course, but a few years ago when I took the pill for medical reasons, I was very sick for two weeks after starting them. You can still have breakthrough bleeding, especially when you begin them. They also made me incredibly moody- not a side effect you want if you are working on your marriage and want to maximize alone with with your husband. I think it would be better if you just let your body do what it’s going to do without trying to control it.
 
Katie966 said:
I think it would be better if you just let your body do what it’s going to do without trying to control it.
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I agree with this statement overall. Be careful what you do to your body, but I am sure you know this already.
 
I’m no expert on women’s fertility cycles but since it’s not done with the intention to avoid a pregnancy but simply to delay periods I see nothing intrinsically bad in it. Of course if it indeed works in 100% of cases or if there are risks involved remain to be determined. I liken this to taking a drug to cure x disease but said drug also makes it impossible for a woman to ovulate while on it. The drug is not taken as a contraceptive but it is as a side-effect if you will. But this is a complex issue, there may be aspects I’m overlooking. Have you tried submitting your question in the Ask an Apologist section?

And I also agree with EasterJoy in that there are other things unitive in nature other than sexual intercourses.
 
NFP is for people with irregular cycles.

taking BCP would make your irregular cycles more irregular. It is a group 1 carcinogen. It shuts down a working system in your body. Not worth it.
 
Keep in mind that when a woman goes off oral contraceptives it takes a while for her cycle to regulate and that could cause a lot of stress in regards to NFP.
Also, when on OC, it is possible to still ovulate while on birth control but implantation could be prevented. So there are abortifacient qualities to the pill.
 
No --I would think one cannot take “the pill” for even a short time to “hold off your period”…that sounds still like contraception.

(for considering the “pill” for non contraceptive -medical reasons…Contact the Paul VI institute…they can help various problems in other ways! Without the risk of cancer. etc etc etc)
 
You pose an interesting question. The thing that strikes me is that your cycles are irregular. This is not normal. I think you could go on hormones for awhile to see if you could get your cycles more regular. This might not be the pill - it might even be some sort of natural progesterone that you use for part of the month. You never know, it might make you more regular if you go off of it after a few months. I think that most priests would approve of something like that.
 
Birth control pills don’t make your cycle more regular. The bleeding that occurs is not menstration but withdrawal bleeding. It fixes nothing regarding being regular. It just masks the problem for a while.
 
ExGratia said:
Birth control pills don’t make your cycle more regular. The bleeding that occurs is not menstration but withdrawal bleeding. It fixes nothing regarding being regular. It just masks the problem for a while.
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This is getting awfully close to medical advice, which is above our pay grade.

I think the question is whether hormones meant as a treatment to delay menstruation (rather than to prevent ovulation) are intrinsically contraceptive or opposed to the laws of marriage. Her doctor is going to have to give the opinion as to whether this plan is healthy, likely to work as planned, or likely to make NFP impossible.

I’m really not sure about this one.
 
excuse me. I was responding to the person who posted above me. I was wrong to comment on the advice offered by that person. I assure you I won’t respond to this post any longer! Still learning…
 
EasterJoy said:
This is getting awfully close to medical advice, which is above our pay grade.

I think the question is whether hormones meant as a treatment to delay menstruation (rather than to prevent ovulation) are intrinsically contraceptive or opposed to the laws of marriage. Her doctor is going to have to give the opinion as to whether this plan is healthy, likely to work as planned, or likely to make NFP impossible.

I’m really not sure about this one.
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Stating a scientific fact is not medical advice.
 
Castello said:
Stating a scientific fact is not medical advice.
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And such scientific facts need to be discussed in a physician’s office, not on an anonymous Internet forum. Here - for a whole host of ethical and legal reasons - isn’t the place.

Luna
 
ExGratia said:
excuse me. I was responding to the person who posted above me. I was wrong to comment on the advice offered by that person. I assure you I won’t respond to this post any longer! Still learning…
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“This is getting awfully close to medical advice” was not aimed at you particularly, but just the general direction the conversation was taking. Sorry about that! :o

I think that here we have people who are experts on how NFP works (more so than many physicians) and we have people who have some idea how to look at this kind of questions in the light of Catholic moral teaching. Even those of us who are experts in pharmacology and gynecology, however, have been asked not to give advice in those areas of expertise on this forum.

This conversation was not giving advice yet, only making general comments. Having said that, the topic was going away from NFP and Church teaching on the moral use of medications with a contraceptive effect and towards the topics of pharmacology and gynecology. Once we get beyond what a prudent layperson can say is normal or isn’t, we are getting getting off the turf set by the forum rules. We are kind of stuck saying, “I’m not sure that your expectations on the medical side are realistic; you might think about asking a doctor about that.”

That’s all I meant to say.
 
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