What is NFP?

I didn’t realize how hard it would be to write about Natural Family Planning methods without writing a bit more about what NFP is and what it is to me.  Right now I’m in that weird land of breastfeeding and trying to chart and writing about that was so much easier, so I jumped in the middle. I apologize for that.

So what exactly is Natural Family Planning? It isn’t one particular way of doing things.  There is no one method; there are at least five different ones.  What they have in common is that by practicing them you use symptoms to figure out when you are fertile so that you can use the information to either achieve or avoid pregnancy.

NFP is not the only thing this falls under though… Fertility Awareness Method often uses the exact same or similar methods.  These two get mistakenly used interchangeably, but they have a main difference. It’s not so much that NFP users tend to be a certain religion (another misconception of sorts), but that FAM allows for barrier methods or even other forms of artificial birth control during fertile periods where NFP is abstinence only when trying to avoid.

This is probably the last you’ll hear me mention FAM…  Any of the methods I post about, any of the books I post about, can probably be used by someone who practices FAM, but I am not comfortable promoting that personally.

Over the next few weeks I’ll go more in depth about several different methods that can be used in NFP and end this particular series with how to choose which method is right for you.