Tracking Your Fertility To Know When Emergency Contraception Will Be Non-abortive
For some people, it’s not a sizable deal—they see conception and life as beginning at implantation. Birth control pill, morning after pill (if primary) don’t cause ethical hangups.
However, I’m addressing the people who have ethical concerns about using the morning after pill, because they believe life begins when a sperm and egg unite and they’re worried about aborting a non-implanted embryo. Morning-after doesn’t abort implanted ones.
Those of you who hold this view are probably quite comfortable with barriers and spermicides. But what happens if a condom breaks and you didn’t consume the spermicide that time? What’s your backup.
Well, it can be Plan B or any of the other emergency contraceptives whose sign names I don’t know as well (note, we’re not talking about RU-486, which is geared towards early abortion). The key is knowing your fertility cycle.
You see, emergency contraceptives work by blocking your ovulation. If the body can’t release an egg, it can’t become fertilized and you won’t become pregnant. They may also prevent the egg and sperm from meeting up…I’m not as clear on how it works, but that’s what they say. And it’s possible that they prevent an embryo from implanting.
Woah, you say. Back up. We don’t want to injure an embryo.
That’s sparkling. There are many occasions where you don’t have to and you can still take emergency contraceptives and the third allotment will never come into play.
(For this next fragment, we’re going to recall that women ovulate on the 14th day of their cycle. This is a harmful oversimplification which has lead to many unplanned pregnancies. But it works nicely for our purposes. I’ll tell you more about figuring out your own cycle later.)
Now let’s say that it’s day 12 of your cycle and your condom breaks. You know you won’t be ovulating for 2 more days, but you’re also aware that sperm can live for 3-5 days (depending on who you listen to). Ok, there’s no way to come by them aid. It’s hard to magically flush the uterus.
But here’s the good news. You know that you shouldn’t be pregnant. You’ve been paying attention to your signs (as referred to below) and are clear you’re not yet fertile. Since you don’t know whether you’ll become fertile before the sperm die, you go with Plan B.
Later that day or the next, you take an emergency contraceptive. It blocks you from ovulating and the egg simply reabsorbs into your body. Congrats–you couldn’t stop the sperm, but you could stop the egg.
Plus, you don’t have any ethical worries, since you know there was no unimplanted embryo floating around in there. What a relief.
But how do you know when to use them?
You become aware of your fertility. This way, you can make the judgment call with a tranquil heart.
I personally like the fertility awareness method. Without getting into too much detail, I’ll say that it involves tracking your waking basal body temperature (just stick the thermometer in your mouth as you wake up) and possibly your cervical fluid and cervical position. Here’s a link to one article which describes various methods of FAM. I wouldn’t recommend the calendar one, but all the others seem like good options to me. And here’s the Wikipedia article on it.
This is similar to Natural Family Planning advocated by the Catholic church, though the church looks down on contraception because life begins before fertilization…I’m not definite on how, but they have explanations.
As I said before, this piece is specifically for women who believe life begins at fertilization. Too often I deem emergency contraceptives are dismissed because people don’t understand the fertility cycle. If you decide that you want to become pregnant, that’s great. But if you don’t feel ready, consider your fertility and whether or not emergency contraception is right for you. I have not been endorsed by any company for this article—I simply feel that emergency contraception is widely misunderstood and a obedient understanding would be beneficial for women and men everywhere.
Know yourself, know your options.
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Filed under ovulation calendar by on Jan 15th, 2012. 