Then people say “Oh, well it CAN be effective, but it’s REALLY complicated, and you have to be SO intelligent and SO organized and SO careful for it work. Really? How much intelligence does it take to see if you are dry that day? If you have any cervical fluid, don’t have unprotected sex again until your basal temp has signifcantly raised for three days. Gee whiz, that is SOOOOO complex.
Honestly, I had A LOT more trouble taking a pill every day at the same time.

FAM is not the right birth control for every woman, but neither are hormonal methods, and neither are condoms. Some women have horrible side effects from the pill. My mother can’t even get a prescription for the pill because of her medical history. Some people have latex allergies, and some people have moral oppositions to the animal products used in other BC methods, or the effect their production has on the environment. It’s just ridiculous that people who have clearly done no research on an alternative BC method feel it is perfectly acceptable for them to go around spreading misinformation about its effectiveness or its level of difficulty.

â??.. `naturalâ?? methods such as Billings are often neglected in the wider debateâ?? – Modia
Theyâ??re (rightly) neglected because they donâ??t work. As a million years of human evolution might lead you to expect.

What I meant was that any discussion of birth control usually centres around condoms, the Pill, and not much else – the fact remains that it’s part of the mix, some people use it, and the reasons they do are worth examining. If it doesn’t work (broadly, everyone’s about right – it’s accurate if you’re good at it, hopeless if you’re not. I wouldn’t dream of it myself), that’s possibly an even better reason to discuss it. There are teenagers I’ve certainly known who relied on a garbled combination of the withdrawal and Billings methods, in the sure confidence – often disproven all too quickly – that it was `99% reliable’.

What interests me most isn’t the rational decisions people make – it’s the irrational ones. In Africa, for example, traditional forms of natural birth control have been practiced for centuries and it’s very difficult to get a population that tends to be suspicious and superstitious to use them, even despite AIDS. Even in Western society, there’s a belief amongst some men that wearing a condom is some sort of threat to their virility and insist on not wearing them. Neither’s a logical position to take, but plenty of people do take them.

There’s nothing that works better in marriage than a nappy over the head. All good Catholic obstetricians know that.

Then again I went to the type of Catholic school where Brother Brendan would yell at us that we’d burn in hell if the First 18 didn’t win on Wednesday afternoon, rather than the type where you were given a solid grounding in casuistry. Can someone help me out here?

Steve rhymes with naive it seems. Simply google wiki for the Billings method and check the failure rates steve. There are ample studies to back that up. You’ll get a pleasant surprise at how they compare with the pill and condoms mate. However as I said, Billings is used by committed partners in contraception, which is why it’s so successful. Fun too when you both decide to plan having kids and I’d thoroughly recommend it and no I’m not Catholic. More yer snipped lapsed Anglican.

Utter garbage. As Anna points out, it only ever works if you work really hard at it.

You really must distinguish between propositions that would be nice if true and propositions that are actually true. If you said something like “the Billings method doesn’t work very well in practice but using alternatives that do work in practice causes eternal damnation” we could at least respect your intellectual honesty.

“.. `natural’ methods such as Billings are often neglected in the wider debate” – Modia
They’re (rightly) neglected because they don’t work. As a million years of human evolution might lead you to expect.

Weird, dude.