A Natural Way

Trading rhythm for awareness t do you call people who use the rhythm method of birth control?" went the old joke. The snap retort: "Parents." That cynical humor was based on unhappy experience. The rhythm method, in which a woman keeps track of her menstrual cycle on the calendar to determine the time of ovulation and hence of maximum fertility, proved to be only about 60% effective. Now the Department of Health, Education and Welfare is bankrolling a $1.4 million study, involving 800 California couples, to test the effectiveness of a new, natural birth control system that may be more reliable than the rhythm method.

Euphemistically called "fertility awareness," the system was developed by a husband-and-wife team of Australian physicians, Evelyn and John Billings. It depends upon observing changes in the consistency of vaginal fluids. In the first days after menstruation, the vagina feels dry because of a decline in hormone production, a sensation that can be confirmed by the woman's examining finger. This is the first "safe" period. Within a few days, as the estrogen levels rise, the mucus feels tacky and appears cloudy and the fertile period begins. Then, at the estrogen peak, the mucus becomes smooth, slippery and stretchable like raw egg white. This condition--which occurs within 24 hours or so of ovulation--usually lasts one to two days and signals maximum fertility. Three days after the mucus becomes cloudy and sticky again, the second safe interval begins, sometimes continuing through another dry cycle before menstruation. In all, the woman must abstain from intercourse for about nine days out of the average 28-day cycle--the hormonal peak day and four days before and after.

Because the method is "natural," it is acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, Monsignor Robert Deegan, of the Los Angeles archdiocese, actively lobbied to get the HEW study grant approved. Still, says Dr. Phyllis McCarthy, an investigator for the study, "some priests are skeptical about the method. They got burned by advising couples to use the rhythm system and don't want any more babies named after them."

Final results of the study, which is being conducted out of Los Angeles' Cedars Sinai Medical Center, will not be in until 1979. But early indications have been so promising that Monsignor Deegan is now establishing a center in Los Angeles for the dissemination throughout the world of information about fertility awareness. The name of the center: World Organization of the Ovulation Method Billings --or, for short. WOOMB.

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