Fertility Awareness After Abortion

This week’s guest is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. She is a Certified Fertility Awareness Educator, Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner, and author of The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. She helps health conscious women discover the connection between their menstrual cycles and their overall health so they can ditch hormonal birth control forever.

Podcast: Fertility Friday is her weekly podcast

Website: http://fertilityfriday.com/

In every episode of this podcast I read a blog post I’ve written and we follow up with a conversation about the topic at hand and what it means for women and their ability to thrive after abortion. Happy listening and as always feel free to send me your reflections and questions.

This week's guest is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. She is a Certified Fertility Awareness Educator, Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner, and author of The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. She helps health conscious women discover the connection between their menstrual cycles and their overall health so they can ditch hormonal birth control forever.

Show notes: 

• 0:57
  Lisa’s podcast: The Fertility Friday Podcast
  Search results for podcasts that mention abortion

• 6:43
  Thoughts on “control”-
  “Fertility awareness is not about control”

• 8:33
  Dancing with and understanding fertility

• 9:05
  Lisa’s fertility story

• 11:51
  Challenges and myths of Fertility Awareness

• 12:13
  Resources- The Fifth Vital Sign, Taking Charge of Your Fertility

• 12:26
  Learning through charting and applying

• 13:49
  Choose a method, understand the rules, and follow them…

• 14:55
  The effectiveness of Fertility Awareness as a method (99.4% with perfect use) and it’s many variations and options

• 19:39
  Understanding where you are on the reproductive spectrum, 0-10

• 21:13
  Decide ahead of time how you are going to manage your fertility

• 22:14
  ”You are not able to predict fertility”
  It’s possible to ovulate earlier or later in any cycle

• 24:50
  Working with a Fertility Awareness instructor
  ”Fertility awareness is not the rhythm method”

• 26:19
  Ease your way into understanding your fertility

• 30:06
  Episode 24- Jane Bennett

• 31:09
  Taking with young women about fertility and body awareness

• 32:08
  ”The menstrual cycle is a sign of health”

• 35:35
  Having PlanB or Ella on standby

• 38:30
  ”What would the world look like if we supported mother?”

• 40:04
  ”There are times when the external situations of your life are different then the desires of your heart”

• 41:03
  When you are not on hormones you are “more you”

• 41:33
  Fertility Awareness is “user dependent”

• 45:12
  Closing thoughts: ”The world wants us to believe that it’s black and white….”

The post:

I know some communities of women who have period parties after their girls arrive at the gates of menstruation for the first time. It’s an opportunity for women of all generations to come together and honor the life-giving force that is a menstruating woman. I’m not sure that there are very many young girls who look forward to these parties, but I like to think those girls will look back in appreciation for this rite of passage. 

When I first got my period, period parties were not a thing my family did, but the woman I babysat for gave me a copy of the latest edition of Our Bodies Ourselves, and it became my bible. That big book, survived all my moves, finding a new bookshelf at each evolution of my walk into adulthood. Twenty-nine years later it’s perched in my office. I haven’t cracked it open in years, and much of it is likely outdated, but it represents freedom for me, access to information that every woman deserves. 

Every time I got my period in the year following my abortion I wanted to call all the women I knew and have a party! There was no follow through on this brilliant idea, but in my mind it was a grand ole time: decorative pads and tampons dangling from the rafters, Bloody Mary’s, Beyonce on the speakers, Red Velvet cake, and of course goodie bags with condoms, juicy romantic short stories, and sex toys… a spicy version of the Red Tent for modern day women. 

In an age of microtechnology, chemical engineering, and access to healing traditions from all around the globe, birth control options can still feel like a game of Russian Roulette. Before unplanned pregnancy numbers like 98% effective feel like a walk in the park, but after unplanned pregnancy they feel like an attack on sexual freedom. 

But maybe it’s all simpler then we make it out to be. Maybe the only attack that’s happening is in our thoughts:

“You can’t trust your body.”
“Menstrual cycles are complicated.”
“Fertility is unpredictable.”

Thoughts that have been passed down to us in media and social programming all our lives. Thoughts that we are 100% in control of keeping or letting go. 

Maybe fertility is asking us to go inward, embrace our cycles, and change our thoughts: 

“I am in control of whether or not I get pregnant.”
“My body is a temple and I decide who comes in and out.”
“Fertility isn’t complicated; it’s a cycle and a skill.”

Fertility awareness is an opportunity. It invites us to understand when we can and cannot get pregnant, and it gives us the tools to understand our bodies in intimate and affirming ways. Fertility awareness empowers us to live as the naturally sexual beings we are without fear of the unknown. 

Fertility awareness is a vital part of reproductive freedom.

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If you are one of the 1 in 4 women who have had an abortion in your lifetime,
and you are not thriving the way you desire: