Family Life Planning Tips

The basic idea of natural family planning, or NFP, is to observe your own body’s patterns to make a decision whether or not to have sexual intercourse on a particular day of your cycle. By observing signs like these, you can learn to predict your fertile days and aim for (or avoid) sex on these days, depending on whether or not you want to get pregnant.

Please note I’m not talking about the Rhythm Method here. NFP is individual to each woman. The Rhythm Method is based on an “average” of all women, which doesn’t help those with irregular cycles.

Since every woman is different, you may not have all these signs, and that’s perfectly okay. But one of the patterns every menstruating woman has is that of a temperature curve. By taking your temperature immediately upon waking every morning (or whenever you wake if you work the night shift) and recording it, you’ll soon notice a pattern. Your temperature rises by about half a degree Fahrenheit, or about a third of a degree Celsius, on the day of or before ovulation, when one of your ovaries releases an egg. The egg lives for about 24 hours; sperm can live anywhere from two to six days, depending on who you ask. So essentially, you have about a week of fertility every cycle, give or take a few days. Your temperature will drop again just before, during, or after your period, and the whole thing starts all over again.