Customer Reviews

Your Fertility Signals: Using Them to Achieve or Avoid Pregnancy Naturally

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This book is well written and easy to understand. There are helpful diagrams and charts that illustrate the points the author is making.

This book is for women who want to better understand their fertility, avoid or achieve conception, eliminate use of the pill or other chemical forms of birth control, and attempt to conceive a baby of one sex or the other. It explains how you can use your basal body temperature (taken before rising first thing in the morning) and your cervical mucous to tell whether you are fertile or not. This allows you to avoid intercourse if you are trying to avoid pregnancy, and to have intercourse at your most fertile times if you are trying to get pregnant.

I think that even women who want to remain on birth control should read this book - it is valuable to understand how your body works and why. For women who are breastfeeding, this book has a whole chapter on using your temp and mucous to ascertain whether your fertility has returned - an excellent tool since chemical birth control while breastfeeding is best avoided. For women who are experiencing infertility, charting your temps and mucous can help you discover why you aren't conceiving, and knowing this can make it easier to seek treatment.

There may be more thorough books on this topic out there, but I think this is one of the best basic ones. I recommend it highly.

I can tell you that I am one of the success stories from using this book. As artificial birth control is against our religion, I needed to learn, so I checked this book out of the library. I learned the method entirely from this book (I never took a single class), and consequently never spent a day of my marriage using artificial birth control. We have spent THREE YEARS successfully avoiding pregnancy, and are now applying the concepts to become pregnant.

This book is written in basic language, not crammed full of medical jargon. You can pretty much read it in one sitting, and understand it. I bought this book as a reference, and still use it from time to time, if I need to check up on the guidelines.

And for those who say that natural family planning results in a huge restriction on intimacy, I will tell you that I am one of those women who has LONG fertile phases, and many annovulatory cycles. Calculating my charts over the last three years, my fertile vs non-fertile time is pretty much equal. This means a lot of abstinence, but it can be done! My husband and I both agree that it has enriched our marriage. It keeps those lines of communication open, and we know that we still love each other, even when abstaining during the fertile phase. Instead of birth control being only the woman's responsibility, it becomes the couple's. Yes, the onus is still on the woman to check her signals, but the man has to be cooperative for the method to work.

The abstinence can be difficult at times, but think of it this way: you get a honeymoon to look forward to every cycle! It keeps those fires burning. All the couples that we know who are on the Pill are down to maybe once or twice a month, and that's after less years together than our three. We are still just as active as when we were first married, because that mandatory abstinence period ensures that you can't take your partner for granted. Not only that, but many of these couples on the Pill have unplanned children, and we don't have any "accidents". Hmm . . . and yet they tell us that we don't know what we're doing, and that natural birth control doesn't work. (Please note: this is NOT the rhythm method! That method is only 75% effective - natural family planning, when used properly, is 99% effective.)

This is a wonderful book for setting people free from society's negativity towards fertility. We don't need harmful pills or intrusive devices to control what is a normal, healthy condition. Instead, we celebrate and respect fertility, and learn to control ourselves.

Only one caveat: As a Catholic, even "barrier methods" are forbidden. The author noted that one could use barrier methods if temporarily unsure about fertility, or if one didn't want to abstain, but did say that pregnancy can obviously still result. Other Catholics and possibly other religions would have to ignore that bit of advice from the book, but other than that, this is a great resource.

Update: I am now happily expecting our first child, who was conceived within seven cycles where my husband and I were applying the guidelines to become pregnant. That should satisfy any skeptics who might think that our three years without an accidental pregnancy was due to infertility! (And nobody who is fertile would be lucky enough to not get pregnant within three years using the outdated rhythm method.) Also, I knew almost from the first day that I was pregnant - because I knew exactly when my period was due. You don't need regular cycles to know this (I don't!), you only need to know which day you ovulated, which the symptoms will tell you. I was able to take my pregnancy test as soon as I was a day late. No wasted pregnancy tests, which is a good thing, as many of us "trying to conceive" women can attest to how expensive they are.

Update: Unfortunately, I lost the first pregnancy to miscarriage. I was too emotionally devastated to want to get pregnant again right away, so I once again used my fertility signals to avoid pregnancy until I wanted to try again. We then got pregnant again when we wanted to, because we knew when we were most fertile. (This baby was born healthy and is now a very happy 9 week old boy). That's the great thing about this method: it's totally reversible. If you take the pill or use depo, you usually have to wait for months to over a year before fertility returns. With this method, you can decide each month whether you want to keep avoiding, or whether you want to start trying. Also, you can avoid using the pill while breastfeeding to avoid passing potentially harmful hormones to your baby.

An excellent overview of human fertility cycles. Very concise and clear-cut, it can be read in one sitting. The charts provided in the back allow a woman to understand her own fertility. This was an invaluable tool for planning my own two pregnancies. I've also lent this book out to several friends who all conceived successfully after reading it. I recommend it highly to anyone trying to make a baby!

This easy-to-read book tells women, step-by-step, how to understand and chart our body's signals to figure out when we can and cannot get pregnant. This is a non-religious approach to natural family planning, and includes instructions for using the method with a condom or diaphragm.

Women can also use this book to figure out the best time to conceive. Other side benefits include: a better understanding of mood swings and other physical and emotional changes that accompany our menstrual cycle; and heightened awareness of abnormalities in our cycle.

The simple writing style and plethora of pictures and diagrams make this a fun, interesting, and very useful book.

I recommended this book to a good friend of mine who'd been struggling to conceive (she has a very irregular cycle); it worked for her and has since worked for several of her friends, too. Interestingly enough, a friend recommended the book to me in the first place, as well!

The information is basic, and the author doesn't write in a complicated manner. I think someone with a sixth-grade education could read the book and use it effectively. Which is good - regardless of our educational backgrounds, I think every woman should know how her body works. There are more 'complex' versions out there, and classes etc. as well - which can also be helpful in addition to this book. But the single most helpful option I found, was Winstein's book. I continue to recommend it to friends who are struggling to get pregnant, and to friends who are looking for other options for family planning.

I used the book for natural family planning, so that I did not have to use chemical or artificial birth control options; when we were ready to start a family, we succeeded the very first month.

I have every confidence that this book will be informative, regardless of whether the purchaser is hoping to avoid or embrace pregnancy. I think Winstein had to walk a fine line while writing this book, in terms of religious issues etc. and managed to do so in a way which allowed her book to be unbiased, open, and helpful regardless of what the readers' backgrounds or goals might be.

This book is so well written and explains very clearly through detailed description and diagrams everything you need to know about mucous. Sounds odd, but if she didn't have such good diagrams I don't know if I would have quite understood what she meant. For the first time in my 35+ years I am understanding my body better than ever and YES, I can actually tell when I'm ovulating now, simply through tracking changes in the mucous as the author recommends. I definitely recommend this book to women who both want or do NOT want to conceive.
June 2004 UPDATE: I'm pregnant now for the 2nd time - unfortunately I miscarried in February. I conceived both times in months that I was careful to follow the fertility signals especially the physical signs of ovulation (i.e "strings" - read the book, you'll know what I mean!) I'm a believer!

I had already gone through the very tedious process of studying NFP from the huge study manual in order to learn about my fertility signals. I ended up adapting the information I had gathered from the huge behemoth NFP manual and several other NFP resources and coming up with what worked best for me. It turns out I was using the Fetility Awareness Method (which this book teaches) without even knowing it. If only I had found this simple little volume first!! :) It is a great way to review and has simple drawings to help certain things stick in your mind. My husband and I used FAM for 9 months to avoid pregnancy, and then used it to achieve pregnancy in only 2 cycles. We are now 7 months pregnant. I would highly recommend this volume to anyone who cannot afford to take an NFP course outside the home and doesn't have the wherewithall the read the several hundred page NFP study manual.

This book is a very simple, concise, easy-to-read explaination of Natural Family Planning. It includes the "how-to" of using both temperature and mucus symptoms to avoid or achieve pregnancy, as well as the cervical position information. I love that it also explains the hormones going on at each phase of the female cycle to help the reader understand WHY these symptoms are happening! I use it as a quick reference instead of dragging out my big Art of Natural Family Planning book from the Couple to Couple League. It also includes brief information about charting your signals during breastfeeding, and information about some common infertility problems. I really like the added information about "Regulating Cycles With Light" and "Choosing Your Baby's Sex". I still think everyone should have the Art of NFP in their library, but this is a great reference for every-day use!

I found this book extremely informative. The format is straight forward and easy to understand. I gave me a complete understanding of the process of conception.

We used the natural fertility signals discussed in the book to conceive both our children. We were successful the first cycle we tried in both cases!

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to achieve or avoid pregnancy.

After several years of being on "the pill", I was sick of the side effects. We had purchased "Your Fertility Signals" years ago, but had not read the book in it's entirety. Four months ago I read the book and shared varying parts with my husband, who was eary of seeking alternatives, however after both of us learned to participate in monitoring my fertility signals he bought in to the program! We recently completed our fourth month of pregnancy free naturally!