Now, I’m not going to debate the HHS’s ruling in this post or state which side I’m on; however, I will tell you that the ruling prompted me to exercise one of our most cherished rights as a democratic nation, and I wrote the president an email about my feelings regarding this ruling.  My purpose here is to discuss how woefully ignorant most women are about their own reproductive system.

This morning, February 11^th, I was watching a news program that I regularly watch on Saturday mornings on MSNBC called Up with Chris Hayes.  I respect Hayes and his program and think he does a good job of presenting a balanced and objective side to the news.  This morning among his guests were a Catholic priest from Notre Dame University and a panel of liberal journalists from Salon.com, The Nation, and The Economist as well as a professor from Columbia University.  The priest patiently and very articulately argued the Catholic side of the issue while the women liberal journalists in particular discussed women’s rights and the role of being able to control one’s fertility by using birth control pills and, if necessary, abortion.  But what I couldn’t help but wonder was: “What about the ability to control your fertility using natural methods such as Natural Family Planning or, as it is now widely referred to, Fertility Awareness.”  However, even by introducing such an argument, I would be patently shouted down as “ignorant” and “naive.” I would counter that argument by saying those who think you cannot accurately and effectively manage your fertility using Natural Family Planning are “Ignorant” and “naive.”

As a culture, we are extremely ignorant about how our bodies work, and the medical profession, by and large, contribute to this ignorance.  We rely too heavily on prescription medications versus old fashion good health.  We’d rather go to a doctor and get a prescription than watch our diets, lose weight, or keep track of our fertility.  The majority of doctors perpetuate this ignorance for a multitude of reasons; they would rather prescribe the pill than spend time educating patients on natural methods. The medical profession and, in turn, American society, treats fertility and pregnancy as a disease that must be managed.  A pill needs to be prescribed, drugs must be administered, labor needs to be monitored from start to finish, and even due dates and when a baby naturally decides to come is no longer respected.  More and more women are being coerced into and even asking for their labor to be induced because it is more convenient than waiting for their bodies to naturally go into labor.

Therefore, for the most part, a woman interested in learning about Natural Family Planning/Fertility Awareness would not be able to go to her OB/GYN or even her midwife to learn about it because the majority of these healthcare providers don’t know anything about it.  I remember as a young married woman going to my OB/GYN and asking about Natural Family Planning.  First she scoffed at the idea that a college educated woman would be asking about such an archaic method of controlling her fertility, and then she mentioned something about thermometers.  Two months ago I visited an OB/GYN for my yearly checkup.  It was a doctor that I’d never gone to before since I have recently moved.  Prior to the exam, the nurse asked what type of birth control I used because, of course, it is just assumed that I use birth control.  When I told her I practiced Natural Family Planning, she scrunched up her face confused for a moment, then said, “Oh, the Rhythm Method.”  I firmly replied, “NO, the Rhythm Method was a useless method practiced in the 1950s and 1960s that no longer exists. I practice Natural Family Planning, a scientifically proven method based on a woman’s cycle of fertility.”  The Rhythm Method has not been taught by the Church or practiced by Catholics for more than 30 years.  Yet, this ignorant perception is still present not only in society but in the medical community.

After I discovered that I couldn’t rely on my doctor to teach me about NFP, I tried on my own to figure it out but was unsuccessful because I lacked the basic knowledge and the tools to make it work.  It wasn’t until a few years later that I came across a secular book that took the stance of why would a woman choose to put chemicals or unnatural devices into her body when she could choose a natural method to be aware of when she was fertile that my husband and I were truly able to begin practicing NFP.  Then a year later we attended a once a year NFP training at our church that further solidified what we were doing.  We’ve been married twenty years and have been using NFP for twelve of those twenty years.  We find that NFP does have the purported 98% effectiveness rate.  During those twelve years, we have had one miscarriage and one child; however, both of these pregnancies were planned and dearly wanted.  On top of gaining the benefits of not putting added hormones and chemicals into my body, we have deepened and enriched our marriage.

The thing that I continue to scratch my head about are those people, mostly Catholics, who say, “I tried Natural Family Planning and it doesn’t work.”  Well, sure, if you don’t follow the rules of your body and have sex during the approximately seven day window of fertility that every woman has a month, then yeah, you’re probably going to get pregnant.  The thing I don’t understand is that when women forget to take their birth control pills or don’t take them in a timely manner and get pregnant, they don’t blame the pills and say they didn’t work.  Therefore, don’t blame the method if you can’t faithfully practice it.

Some women say that it’s too much to deal with, that NFP requires too much time per day.  Nonsense!  It takes about 1 minute per day to practice–taking your waking temperature and/or checking your cervical fluid (depending on the method of NFP you’re practicing) and charting your results–and yes, there’s an app for that.  I know at the very mention of cervical fluid some readers will respond with a squeamish “Ewwww!”  I would argue that checking your cervical fluid is less disgusting than changing a baby’s dirty diaper.  And guess what, NFP costs practically nothing to practice, a ten dollar digital Basil Body Temperature thermometer and a free app on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, or a good, old fashioned paper chart.

My overall point is: why doesn’t the debate over a woman’s right to control her own fertility ever include a woman’s right to choose and educate herself about natural, noninvasive, and non-harmful methods for controlling her fertility?  Why are women such as me seen as ignorant and backwards for not wanting to put chemicals into our bodies that don’t necessarily block conception but instead blocks implantation of a zygote or for not wanting to put chemicals into our bodies that in the future may impede our ability to get pregnant when we want to or that might cause cancer later in our lives?  Are those ignorant and backwards concerns and arguments?

Frankly, I would say that someone like me who has educated herself on how her body works and actively participates in the natural processes of my body is more enlightened than someone who takes a pill or inserts a potentially harmful device such as Nuvo ring or an IUD into her uterus.  Have you ever listened to the side effects listed on some of these commercials or read the drug information that comes in the drug packaging?

I think the Church should seize up this moment to educate Catholics and, in turn, the public at large about NFP and Fertility Awareness.  Even Catholics who are interested in learning more about NFP would be hard pressed to get training or information through the Church.  Frankly, I’d love to see Planned Parenthood and other secular outlets teaching NFP methods as well.  This debate should be seen as a teaching moment to open people’s minds and expand their knowledge–not as a divided pro/con intractable, immobile debate.  I pray that perhaps in the future, a woman’s reproductive rights won’t be narrowly defined by her ability to purchase a pill.

For the past seventeen years, I have stayed at home or worked part-time while Matt carried the burden of being the primary and sometime sole earner.  With that burden came stress and worry.  Stress over meeting deadlines and expectations both at work and at home and bowing to the whims of people (and I’m sorry to say that my name is on this list) who were often unfair, politically motivated, and self-serving.  He worried over losing his job and putting our family in jeopardy.  This burden was making him sick.  In my own defense, for the last seven years, I had been working two jobs, teaching and tutoring part-time at a local community college.  Between my two jobs, I was pretty much working full-time; I just wasn’t getting any of the full-time “perks,” such as a livable wage or health benefits.  I felt stress as well, but nothing to the magnitude that Matt did.  While his lay-off was horrible, in the long run, it will probably prove to be a blessing; it may have even saved his life.

Knowing his lay-off was pending, we both started sending out resumes and looking for full-time employment.  While we wanted to remain in the Philadelphia area where we had developed deep roots over the past eleven years, we were open to moving back to the Midwest so that we could be closer to our aging parents.  We had moved to Philadelphia from Chicago in 2000 so that Matt could take the job that he was now getting laid off from, so moving and starting over again, wasn’t something new to us.  Therefore, while we were concentrating on staying in the East, we were casting a wide net when applying for positions.  Then, after several months of looking, I was offered a full-time teaching position, which had been a goal of mine even before Matt’s lay-off, at a university in Southern Ohio.  So we up-rooted our three daughters and our lives and moved to a small town in the rust belt of Appalachia—a completely foreign area to us.  But the East was once an unknown, so we knew we could adapt.

Now, I’m the one working late and calling home with a guilty sound in my voice, knowing (and hoping) my presence is needed at home.  Before, I was the one who knew all the parents at the girls’ school and all the families at church because I was the one who volunteered at our school and church.  Now, after Mass, Matt’s the one talking and saying hi to our fellow parishioners while I don’t know a soul.  School events are lonely, solitary events that I attend with a pang of longing for the familiar faces of dear friends.  Matt is the one attending field trips with our youngest and spending all those precious moments with her that I used to get to enjoy.  During a recent doctor’s appointment for our three daughters, when the doctor questioned me, the mother and the person who should know, about one of our daughter’s migraines, I looked to Matt because I didn’t know the answers.  He was the one who had been there for all of her care; I was at work.

It isn’t just these big things where we’ve traded places, but the small ones too.  In the past, especially when our oldest was small and Matt didn’t know better, he would often come home to find the house a mess, dishes in the sink, and the laundry undone.  Many an argument was started with “What did you do all day?”  However, that quickly changed because Matt is such an involved parent that he soon realized the time and energy it takes to care for a small child (and an older child for that matter).  Now that he’s home all day, he understands that the window between the time the girls go off to school and when they come home is actually relatively small in relationship to the things that need to get done during that time, especially when the majority of his time is spent researching jobs, tweaking resumes, and spending hours navigating poor employer sites and answering questions that he knows he’ll only be re-asked during any potential interview (but that’s another blog).  Therefore, there are many days that the dishes are still in the sink when I get home and the laundry is piling up and the floor needs vacuumed, but I know better than to say anything because I’ve been there; I’ve done that.

Now I know the stress of something going wrong at work and worrying that it might have dire consequences.  I know the sensation of biting my tongue and swallowing my pride when office politics gets the best of me (honestly, I’m still working on this one).  I’m the one who’s snapping at the kids when I come home because I’ve had a difficult or overwhelming day (okay, that happened before too).  But now I have a clear understanding of what it means to be the sole provider, and I also realize how unrealistic it was of me to suggest that he “just quit” every time he raged about work.

As the old Native American saying goes, “You can’t know a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”  While I don’t recommend losing your job, I do recommend trading places with your spouse from time to time.  So many times when we quarrel with our spouses because of stress and worry at work or undone dishes at home, it’s only human nature to feel affronted, to take the other’s comments as a personal attack.  Next time, maybe you can’t physically trade with your spouse as Matt and I have, but you can take a step back from your own feelings and mentally and emotionally try to be more understanding and empathetic when your spouse voices his or her concerns and fears; you can think about where he or she is coming from and try to find out the motives and feelings behind his or her words.  Most importantly, no matter how much you like your nice house, cable TV with HBO, health club or country club memberships, designer clothes, and weeklong vacations at a beach house on the coast, is it really worth your spouse’s mental and physical health and possibly your marriage to maintain all of those things?  I say no.

Trading places has made us, to an extent as we aren’t perfect after all, more compassionate of one another and the “position” we hold in the family, and it has made our marriage stronger because we’ve taken the time to try to learn the lessons that life is handing us.  We are learning to let the piddlely-crap, like the dishes, go.  Or at least, now we make the girls do them.

From an early age, mom made sure I did chores around the house.  In the summer, she’d leave lists of chores for me to complete–I hated that and usually waited until ten minutes before she pulled in the driveway to start doing them.  Once in a while I got busted for dusting around the knick-knacks on the end tables instead of removing them, dusting them, and then dusting the table.  She also made sure that I knew how to do my own laundry, which served me well when I went away to college and didn’t have her to do it for me anymore, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t save it up for her when I knew I was coming home for the weekend.

I didn’t do much cooking when I was home although I’d been cooking with my mom and grandma since I was two or three.  It was around this age that my mom was bragging to my grandma that mom and I had made cookies together, but I busted poor mom when I told grandma, ”Mom sliced them and I baked them.”  We did make cookies from scratch together too.  I still remember the gray and multicolored speckled melamine bowl and the wooden spoon we used to use to mix the cookies together.  I still enjoy cooking and think I’m a fairly good cook in my own right.

Sometimes you have to be your husband’s hero. Young girls are conditioned by Disney that some day their prince will come and be their hero and the girls will worship their princes forever.  My dad was my hero.  He was larger than life to me when I was a little girl both physically and emotionally.  He was a physically strong man and liked to put up a tough exterior.  However, as a Vietnam vet he was often bested by post traumatic stress disorder, and especially in his later years, he needed a lot of care.  Though I know some days she was tired, frustrated, and angry, Mom was there for him every step of the way.  She took care of him when he needed it the most and never turned away in his weakest moments.  She was strong for him–which leads me to the most important lesson I learned from my mom.

Know when it’s time to let go. We lost my dad two years go from complications from pneumonia.  He was ill for several months and was in and out of the hospital.  Mom never left his side.  She slept in the hospital waiting room and bathed in the sink in the hospital bathroom for weeks at a time.  But when his lungs were so ravaged from infection and emphysema that every breath was a fight, we made the decision to put him on a ventilator to try to give his body a rest and his lungs time to heal.  However, a week later when he showed no improvement and no signs of regaining consciousness, I wanted more tests run and was hanging on.  But mom knew, it was time to let him go.  Last night, my husband Matt and I were giving a PreCana talk to engaged couples about different adjustments they will have to make over the course of their married lives.  My final word on the subject was the lesson I learned from mom:  So many people at the end of their lives hang on for their spouses because they are afraid their spouses will be so crushed by their death that their lives will be ruined. Even though it will be the most difficult thing you’ll ever do, it will be the most unselfish.  Give your spouse the gift of letting go when it’s time.

Thanks, Mom.  I know you didn’t think I was paying attention when you were “teaching” me these lessons, but I was.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Below are the seven words that seem the most offensive to the GOP:

7. Liberal: has become such a dirty word that even liberals are backing away from it.  For example, the president has labeled himself a  “pragmatic progressive” and not a liberal.

6. Global Warming: “Drill, baby, drill!”  Of course, they don’t believe in global warming because if they did then they’d have to do something about their oil and gas campaign donors.    Besides that, regulation, whether it is for the environment, banking, or food and drugs, is probably dirty word #8 to the GOP.

5. Planned Parenthood:  Okay, confession: Planned Parenthood makes me uncomfortable.  As a Catholic, I’m not thrilled that at certain locations the organization offers abortion services; however, no matter how against abortion and contraception you are, you have to admit that Planned Parenthood does a lot of good by providing reproductive health services (pap smears, cancer screening, STD screening and treatment, etc.) to men and women who may not have the financial means to seek treatment elsewhere.  Defunding Planned Parenthood will put the health of millions of the poor at risk.  Yes, the worker that was entrapped by Live Action was in the wrong and she was fired for her actions; however, we should also look at the motives of Live Action and who their backers are.

4. Abortion: Certain members of the GOP, specifically Bobby Franklin, a Republican State Representative from the 43^rd District in Georgia, wants to make abortion a capital offense, meaning any woman who has an abortion and anyone who performs the abortion could get the death penalty.  Franklin even went so far as to introduce a bill to the Georgia House which would force a woman who suffers a miscarriage to prove that no human had a hand in the death of her fetus. (For more on this issue, see my blog post from March 5, 2011.)  Abortion advocates and foes will forever be diametrically opposed until they get some compassion for the victims, and I don’t just mean the fetuses, but the women who have to make the gut wrenching decision to have an abortion.  Abortion isn’t birth control for the majority of these women; there are a combination of complicated social issues that play into a woman’s decision–everything from economics and pressure from her partner to a lack of familial and social support.  Do these women really deserve to be put to death, especially when many studies have shown that this decision affects them for the rest of their lives?

3. Collective Bargaining Sure, the GOP is against unions; unions have been the enemy of big business since the early 20th century when they organized workers to strike for safe working conditions.  Yes, unions are to blame in some industries for “bloating” workers salaries and benefits; however, the good that unions do far out weighs the bad.  If you look at industry where workers have poor working conditions, where illegal immigrants do most of the work, and where workers have poor wages and little to no benefits, you won’t find unions.

2.  Education: Republicans in Washington and republican governors across the country want to balance their budgets by cutting education funding.  However, how are we, the United States, supposed to have a competitive workforce if education budgets are slashed?  When education funding is cut, it isn’t the football and basketball programs or administrators’ salaries that get whacked; it’s the teachers, their salaries and benefits, and arts programs.  When districts cut teachers, classroom size goes up, meaning less individual attention for students and overwhelmed and overworked teachers.  When districts cut teachers salaries and benefits, teachers, both bad and good, leave education for the private sector, again raising class size. And when arts programs are cut, not ever student is equally served and educated.  Higher education, specifically community colleges, which President Obama has been very vocal in supporting, is feeling the cuts as well.  Cuts to community colleges means that higher education becomes less accessible to the poor and non-traditional students and it means that there will be fewer full-time positions available for educators, which will lead to more Americans without a steady income and health benefits.  I know because I’m one of these educators.

1. Uterus:  That’s right, uterus!  I think women, specifically Republican and Tea Party women, need to ask themselves what it says about the GOP’s attitude toward women and women’s rights when one of them implies that the correct anatomical term for a woman’s womb, the body part the GOP seems the most immediately concerned with, is so offensive that the word can’t be uttered in public, let alone the floor of the Florida House.  It is not as if the offender, Rep. Scott Randolph, used Carlin’s dreaded c-word.

Perhaps the #1 “dirty word,” uterus, gives us a clue into the GOP’s mindset regarding women.  If we look back on the list I’ve just compiled, words 1-5 are related to women either directly or indirectly.  The majority of the educators in this country are women, and the collective bargaining controversy began with the bargaining rights of teachers in Wisconsin.

The reason the Republican’s attack on women is particularly disturbing to me is because it seems to be a foreshadowing of one possible future for this country, a future that Margaret Atwood predicted in my favorite book, The Handmaid’s Tale.  In this dystopian novel, a neo-conservative group, Gilead, has taken over an environmentally ruined United States.  Gilead’s first move after taking over the government: take away ALL the rights of women.  During a book club discussion that I was moderating in 2001 of this excellent novel, one woman commented that she was thankful something like the plot of this novel could never happen.  She was shocked when I told her it already was happening–in Afghanistan–what the Taliban did in that country was exactly what the fictional Gilead did in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Is the GOP’s assault against women just a precursor to our own Taliban?  You might say, never, not here.  You might even think I’m a whack job for even suggesting such a radical idea.  But consider  how Americans obviously have a history of voting against their own interests.  Case in point, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Rod Blagojevich, the Republican upset in November 2010. . .

Nixon lied to the people, yet he was reelected; George W. Bush scared the people and unilaterally got us into a war that he had no plan of ever getting us out of, yet he was reelected; Rod Blagojevich was just crazy and sold or attempted to sell Illinois favors throughout his Governorship, yet he was reelected; the American people were so frustrated with the GOP that they voted for change in 2008 only to be frustrated that that change didn’t  happen overnight, so they reelected and elected members of the GOP in November 2010 wherever they could.

Therefore, why wouldn’t the American people continue to vote against their own interests by limiting the rights of women–women still don’t have equal rights under the law as men because there is no Equal Rights Amendment.

Come to think of it, perhaps my choice of uterus as the number one dirty word to Republicans was a bit hasty; perhaps I should have chosen women instead.