I watched an informational video earlier tonight about natural birth control – the Justisse Method, which involves charting your basal body temperature and tracking your cervical mucus so you know precisely which days you are/aren’t fertile each cycle.
I’ve been on hormonal birth control for almost 3 years and it bothers me that I’m on it. My side effects haven’t been as bad as many women’s, but any side effects at all are a bummer. One of the worst ones I’ve had is a day each month when I feel suicidally depressed for no reason. There have been times where it’s been so bad that I’ve thought about going off it, but I am just so terrified of getting pregnant that it doesn’t seem like a good option even though we use other contraceptive methods as well.
I asked my doctor a few months ago whether I could get a non-hormonal IUD, since I’m not keen on being loaded up with fake hormones anymore, but she said she doesn’t think I’m a good candidate because I’ve never been pregnant so the insertion would be very painful for me. I know childfree and never-pregnant women who have had IUDs so this seems like a flimsy excuse to me. I might push the issue or ask a different doctor about it, sometime in the future.
I have a family history of breast cancer so hormonal birth control doesn’t seem like a workable long-term solution for me. I might try Justisse at some point but I worry about doing it wrong and most of the professional Justisse advisement services are prohibitively expensive for my student budget. I dunno, man.