Fertility Charting

Monitoring Cervical Mucus for Family Planning

By Natural Fertility ⋅  Email ⋅  Print ⋅

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Natural Fertility RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Natural family planning is very effective when used to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. There are a variety of methods used in NFP when trying to conceive and a few tools such as ovulation beads to make it easier to predict ovulation. The easiest way to use NFP to conceive is to count forward 10 days from the first day of your period. Then make love every day for an entire week (maybe twice a day). With this method you will not miss ovulation if you are on a 28-29 day cycle and you will have a great supply of sperm ready to fertilize your egg. If you are intent on pinpointing ovulation then here is a great primer on checking your cervical mucus.

Copyright 2006 David Picella

Natural family planning has been shown to be up to 99% effective when used for the purpose of avoiding pregnancy. It can also be used as a method of assisting infertile couples to achieve pregnancy. Sometimes couples learning the cervical mucus method of natural family planning experience confusion as they attempt to accurately document the signs of fertility. NFPList.org has published a flowchart that demonstrates an algorithm for making cervical mucus observations which can be summarized as follows:

The very first thing that must be done before anything else is to decide if the cervical mucus was lubricative. The lubricative sensation must be obvious. If the mucus is lubricative, it is considered “peak-type” indicating that it is very fertile. It is still necessary to observe and finger test a lubricative observation so that the characteristics of the peak-type mucus are documented completely. Determining whether or not lubrication is present occurs before any visual observations are made–this is important to remember!

“Cervical mucus changes are monitored for determining when ovulation occurs through the cervical mucus monitoring test. As your cycle progresses, your cervical mucus increases in volume and changes texture. The changes in the mucus that is secreted from the cervix reflect where you are in your cycle. The consistency of your cervical mucus changes during the cycle due to hormonal fluctuations. You are considered most fertile when the mucus becomes clear, slippery, and stretchy. Many women compare mucus at this stage to raw egg whites.” Babyhopes.com

If the mucus is not lubricative, then it is necessary to determine whether or not anything can be lifted from the tissue or stretched between the fingers. If there is no “lift” AND there is no lubrication, then the observation is essentially dry (see flowchart). If the mucus can be lifted, then the finger testing procedure must be performed.

When lifting mucus, if it is either stretchy (1 inch or more) or at least a portion of it is clear (meaning that it looks like saran-wrap and you can see through it), then it is considered peak-type mucus. If non-lubricative mucus is not stretchy AND it is also not clear, then it is considered non-peak mucus. It should be noted that non-peak mucus is also fertile meaning that intercourse on a day of non-peak mucus would be expected to lead to a pregnancy.

This brief algorithm for making cervical mucus observations is obviously not meant to substitute for proper instruction with a certified natural family planning instructor. Similarly, without proper instruction, natural family planning cannot be expected to be as reliable as has been shown in published studies. While there are multiple methods of natural family planning that rely on the observation of cervical mucus based on very similar decision making strategies, they may not all be exactly the same.

“Cervical mucus plays an important role in enabling you to get pregnant. The most important role that it plays is that it facilitates conception by allowing fertilization to occur at a time distant from ovulation. The role of the cervical mucus is to nourish, protect, and speed the sperm on its way up through the uterus and into the Fallopian tubes so that it can fertilize the egg and help you in getting pregnant.” Babyhopes.com

If this article has peaked your interest in natural family planning, then perhaps now is the best time to find someone in your area who can introduce you to a this wonderful, safe, effective, and low cost way of understanding and learning to live in harmony with your fertility. What are you waiting for?

About the Author:
NFP and Infertility: http://www.majella.us Pregnancy calculator: http://picella.com/tools/pregnancy-date-calculator.htm David Picella, NP, is a PhD student at the University of Milwaukee Wisconsin.
Image Source: http://flickr.com/photos/biggreymare/951706000/

Tags for this post