Natural Family Planning International

Dr. Christopher Tietze of The Population Council sought to clarify the confusion as to whether or not a woman could conceive while nursing her baby and attempted to review all the available demographic medical work.  In New York, September 1961, his work was presented before the International Population Conference; the paper was titled “The Effect of Breastfeeding on the Rate of Conception.”  In this paper he concluded the following points:

1.  The prolonged absence of menstruation seems to be the major factor involved in the delay of conception among nursing mothers;
2. During breastfeeding and with the absence of menstruation, “ovulation is suppressed and  conception therefore impossible;”
3. While ovulation is normally followed by a menstrual flow, “the first menstrual flow is preceded by ovulation in only a minority of women;”
4. A woman has about a 5% chance of conceiving before the return of her first menstrual period;
5. When menstruation returns, the first two periods are usually sterile;
6. The risk of conceiving “increases rapidly after menstruation has returned;”
7. And since “breastfeeding tends to prolong the interval between pregnancies, it seems worthwhile to evaluate it as a method of child spacing.”  

To learn more about natural child spacing, please read The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding.
Sheila Kippley

Mariola O’Brien, my recent correspondent from Sweden, learned the Seven Standards via the book, The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding: The Frequency Factor, prior to the birth of her first baby. Practicing ecological breastfeeding, she experienced an amenorrhea of 18 months, 3 weeks. When she sent in the NFPI breastfeeding survey, she added this comment:

“My son Isaac was 18 months when my husband and I really wanted to have another baby, but I was still in breastfeeding amenorrhea. I went to visit a friend and stayed away for 5-6 hours, knowing Isaac would be emotionally well with Dad. This meant a sudden change in nursing frequency, which quickly brought back my period. I was fertile right away after that and conceived!

Previous to this separation between me and my son, I had never gone so many hours without nursing. My breasts were full and he nursed happily on my return. It was the sudden change in nursing frequency that brought back my fertility. I made sure it wasn’t gradual, because we wanted to conceive; I deliberately ‘broke out of’ amenorrhea.

After this one experience though, I continued nursing like before, day and night. After getting pregnant I kept nursing, but during the pregnancy the nursings got more and more infrequent.  Isaac said it tasted funny/yucky, it was painful and uncomfortable for me to nurse and my milk supply dropped.  The longest he went without nursing during the pregnancy was 5 days, the 5 days prior to delivery.

After our daughter Olivia was born, Isaac wanted to nurse frequently again.  For the first 2 months up to 3-4 times a day. The milk was so rich!  At 3 months post-partum he nursed once a day, in the mornings (first thing!).

At 7.5 months post-partum, he would skip his daily nurse once in a while until he stopped nursing altogether at 9.5 months post-partum.  He was 3 years, 1 months and 2 weeks old when he nursed for the last time. He still sleeps in our room but in his own bed.”

For an easy read on the Seven Standards and an inexpensive book, please read The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding. Many say it does not work, but the research proves otherwise.

Sheila Kippley

Mariola O’Brien runs the website Responsive Parenting (www.responsiveparenting.net) together with a friend, and blogs at Continuum Mama (www.mariolaobrien.blogspot.se)

A mother from Sweden has this to say about ecological breastfeeding.

“Thank you, Lord, for eco-breastfeeding.

Sheila, it’s wonderful that you and John keep promoting and informing about eco-bf; it’s every mother’s right to know about this.

On that note, Olivia is 18 months old now and still keeping me in breastfeeding amenorrhea. It will be exciting to see for how long. Both my husband and I are looking forward to having a third child, but not yet. It’s so awesome how good it all is when we stay in tune with nature; we would have felt quite overwhelmed had I gotten pregnant before now. With proper spacing, there is so much joy and room to celebrate each new family member. Nursing on cue still, it is likely that we will have a few months more before conceiving. I am so grateful to God for this gift! I am so grateful to Him to know that this is indeed His plan; that we don’t have to stretch ourselves too thin and put a strain on our family to do His will. This is actually His will!

Until reading your book, I accepted openness to life as something that sometimes would almost “kill” parents, wreck the mother’s health and make the children suffer. I accepted it as a sacrifice to respect God’s command to multiply and be fruitful. I accepted that in some cases, this suffering was the only option, since it seemed to me that some women were “more fertile” than others. But it never really made sense to me, it wasn’t logical. There was discord, and God is not a chaotic God who doesn’t think of the consequences. Animals don’t end up in this situation. They are made for what they take on, so why were we different, or worse off? Now, everything is all too clear to me, even historically, and I feel like we’re at a time when we discover that the earth is actually not flat but round, if you see what I mean.

What Catholics usually do is to live “naturally” in the sense that they refrain from artificial contraception, but they don’t always have a natural mothering style, so then they are only following God’s plan half-way. Using contraception and ‘having a child every year’ are two extremes. Neither lifestyle is balanced, and what’s more, neither is God’s intention for the human family.

It’s so awesome and cool that Olivia is actually “securing” the care she needs from us, and in particular from me, through nursing; she is postponing the arrival of a sibling because it is best for her. God is such a genius to have created our female bodies this way! He thought of everything.

Anyway, this was a long email, I’m just so excited about this! May God bless you and your family!”

Mariola O’Brien runs the website Responsive Parenting (www.responsiveparenting.net) together with a friend, and blogs at Continuum Mama (www.mariolaobrien.blogspot.se)

Next week: Her comments regarding natural child spacing with her first baby.
Sheila:  When I read Mariola’s letter, I remembered a conversation I had two years ago with a Kenyan mother who had been given our manual by a friend. Her main comment was that her people had no need for this book. They use only breastfeeding to space their babies.   We have been promoting natural birth spacing via breastfeeding for over 45 years. In 1995 Saint John Paul II endorsed the recommendation of UNICEF for mothers to breastfeed for at least two years. My hunch is that if the Church as a whole would accept that counsel, there would be far fewer couples resorting to contraception.