In honor of International Women’s Day, I want to share a conversation I recently had with someone who is very close to me.
I utterly respect this woman — she exemplifies many of the gifts that I associate with being a woman. She welcomes others with generosity and ease. She tackles problems with perseverance and pragmatism, and she’s someone who can make tough decisions while maintaining respect for those with whom she is dealing. She values the interpersonal, going the extra mile to make people feel loved, cared for, and remembered. She balances a strong work ethic with an enviable commitment to family.
To paraphrase Star Wars, “The force of motherhood is strong in this one.” I happen to know she deeply desires to give birth to her own children someday, but already she is powerfully living out her gift of “motherhood” — through her intuition, her sensitivity to and capacity for others, and her radical generosity.
Right now, this woman is struggling with infertility. She had no idea that she would face this trial until she started taking sympto-thermal fertility awareness classes during the year leading up to her wedding. She always thought she had a normal cycle, until at her first class, her instructors took a look at her chart and told her they had never seen anything like it before, and recommended she see a doctor. She later learned that her charts indicated that she might not be ovulating each cycle. It was a crushing realization, and since then she has been working with doctors to try to figure out what is going on.
I asked her recently if she wishes she had learned to chart earlier — for example, when she was a teenager or even a college student — and to my surprise, at first she said, “No.”
As we continued the conversation, we both began to realize that there were a lot of factors behind her initial response, and many of them boiled down to the reality that there simply wasn’t enough readily available support at that time — from family, physicians, and her community at large — to encourage a frank look at that part of her overall health. Even if she had realized she might be having problems, given the lack of available resources and her own reticence toward self-care, she probably would have set it aside as something to worry about later, when she actually wanted to pursue pregnancy.
And she’s not alone. One of my aunts shared that when she was a teen, she had excruciatingly painful periods, but she felt she couldn’t talk to her parents about it, and when she went to her physician, his only solution was to offer her birth control, which she did not want to take. So she muscled her way through years of pain until, three years into her marriage and after many doctors’ worth of fertility treatments, she finally found not only a solution but more importantly an explanation by working with Dr. Thomas Hilgers and his women’s health science NaPro Technology. She has three beautiful daughters as a result. Read more of her story here.
It got me thinking. Here in the U.S., we live in a society in which contraceptives are easily available in the grocery store aisle or the nearest pharmacy or walk-in clinic, a society in which mothers and doctors are deciding that hormonal contraceptives are necessary for their teens to keep in check things like acne and their “moods” (yes, I’ve actually heard of moms who put their daughters on birth control because they don’t want to deal with their emotional drama).
We live in a society in which women and couples spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on IVF and artificial insemination and surrogacy and even “designer” babies. And now companies are finding ways to incentivize fertility by offering assistance in freezing eggs for future use so that women can work now and worry about babies later.
We have all these external methods and means, products and procedures available to help women manage everything from painful cycles to acne, emotions to actual birth control.
And yet … the majority of women don’t have enough basic knowledge about their fertility cycles to even know how to read what their own bodies are telling them.
What is keeping us back from making fertility awareness mainstream?
I think of this woman, my aunt, and many other women I know, and I wonder how their lives would have been different if their mothers had been comfortable enough to teach them fertility awareness as they grew, and aware enough to compensate in diet and lifestyle choices in order to give their daughters the best chance at healthy cycles. I wonder how their lives would have been different if they had felt free to talk about what was happening or not happening with their cycles with their girlfriends, parents, physicians, coaches, and mentors. I wonder how their lives would have been different had their family physicians and their dermatologists seamlessly incorporated fertility awareness in their care, and if health care plans treated it as part of the package deal instead of something extraordinary. I wonder how their lives would have been different if fertility awareness were treated as an integral part of real women’s health care, and less as simply an aid for getting pregnant or avoiding pregnancy when the time came for that.
Now, I’m enough of a realist to know that not everything is in our control. The fact that any woman struggles with infertility or other problems with her reproductive system is not her fault, or her mother’s fault or her doctor’s fault. It’s a painful, complicated and all-too-present reality for many.
But what would the world look like if women’s health were cared for in a more integrated fashion, one that included fertility awareness as a foundational concept? On this International Women’s Day, as we celebrate all the many gifts that women bring to the world, I think it’s a fair question to ask.
International Women’s Day purports to be about furthering respect for the justice and dignity of women. Its adopted color, purple, symbolizes these values, and this year women are asked to #PaintItPurple throughout social media to raise awareness for the cause of women’s equality in the world. It is inspiring to browse through the events planned and see the variety of ways that the economic, political and social achievements of women are being celebrated and advanced.
I think all of the IWD event organizers would agree that it is important to ensure that women are truly free to bring all of who they are to the table. This is why I feel so passionately that fertility awareness should take its rightful place in mainstream health care.
Women cannot be reduced to their mere capacity to give physical birth to a child; however, that capacity for others is an integral part of who they are and shapes not only their physical lives, but their emotional, intellectual and spiritual lives as well. As initiatives like Natural Womanhood indicate, women are waking up to how their natural design affects so much more than simply their biological capacity to give birth.
As such, it would benefit not just women themselves, but society as a whole if that capacity were respected and integrated fully, in all of its expressions, and if women were encouraged to learn about, understand and appreciate that capacity from their youth. A key part of this is learning about fertility awareness. It is a non-negotiable part of the Purple — it is an injustice to women for something that is so much a part of them not to be fully accommodated and welcomed in society, and it is below their dignity to pressure or expect any woman to leave behind or compromise it for any relational, social, political or financial gain.
And yet, once again, how many women — successful, forward-thinking, intelligent women — do not even know what their own bodies are telling them?
Maybe by the time my own daughters celebrate International Women’s Day as adults, things will be different. I can only hope so, and do what I can to work toward that change.
This article was last updated on April 6th, 2023 to include new links to Natural Womanhood content.
