Fertility Awareness

Family Planning, Natural, Natural Family Planning

What Affects the Test

For all methods

Fertility awareness methods will not work very well:

• If they are not used consistently.
• During stressful times, after a baby is born, after you stop taking birth control pills, or just before menopause.
• If both partners are not willing to work together to use them.

Calendar (rhythm) method

The calendar method will not work very well if:

• You have irregular, short, or long menstrual cycles.
• You breast-feed for more than 6 months.
• You supplement breast-feeding with bottle-feeding.

Basal body temperature (BBT) method

The BBT method will not work well if you:

• Have a fever.
• Take some medicines, such as ASA (Aspirin).
• Are travelling, having problems sleeping, or having other stress.
• Use a different thermometer, take the thermometer out too soon, take your temperature at a different time of day, or take your temperature in a different way.

Cervical mucus method (Billings method)

The cervical mucus method will not work very well if you:

• Use vaginal lubricants or douche.
• Are breast-feeding.
• Have a vaginal infection.
• Are close to menopause.

Hormone monitoring

The results of hormone monitoring may not be correct if you do not follow the home ovulation kit instructions exactly.

Combined (sympto-thermal) method

Anything that changes the results of one of the methods also changes the results of the combined method.

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Author:	Carrie Henley Jan Nissl, RN, BS	Last Updated: August 31, 2006
Medical Review:	Adam Husney, MD - Family Medicine Joy Melnikow, MD, MPH - Family Medicine Kirtly Jones, MD - Obstetrics and Gynecology Femi Olatunbosun, MB, FRCSC - Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine
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