Hope, Health and FEMM
My name is Kayla and I am a Medical Assistant and a FEMM (Fertility Education and Medical Management) Educator at the Iowa City clinic. Before being hired on full-time in 2018, I volunteered as a receptionist for 3 ½ years. I have loved working here and love the men and women I work with. I have also enjoyed taking FEMM classes over the last several months and have loved educating my first clients!
Natural family planning (FEMM) has been a huge blessing for my husband and me. Not only do we have a beautiful baby boy, but I have never felt as healthy or in-tune with my body.
I was never taught what a period was, I just simply knew I would start bleeding at some point in my life. My mom never talked about it with me or prepared me. Unfortunately, this is common for a lot of women I know and have met. Another common thing many of us have in common is the age we began taking hormonal birth control. My period came when I was 14 years old. A little less than one year later, my parents told me that they would be putting me on birth control. This was their equivalence to a “sex talk”. If I was on birth control, I couldn’t get pregnant, and if I couldn’t get pregnant, then a sex talk wasn’t necessary. This of course is false. You can most certainly get pregnant while on hormonal birth control. In fact, 8% of women who are on “the pill” get pregnant every year. My parents also didn’t understand that talking with me about sex could have quite possibly given me a better view of myself. I did not understand how valued I was by God and therefore did not treat my body as though it had any worth.
After seven years of several different types of hormonal birth control being put into my body, I started seeing things more clearly. Not having a period was not normal. It was not how God intended my body to operate. If I wasn’t getting a period, how was the rest of my body responding to that? I had heard about a holistic approach to birth control called natural family planning but really didn’t know much about it. I decided to give an educator a call to learn more. I was absolutely floored at the information she was able to give me during our first session. The anatomy lesson alone taught me so much about my body that I had never been taught in depth about. I honestly didn’t even know where my fallopian tubes were! By the end of our appointment, I knew the layout of my entire reproductive system, how it operated, and how I could track my overall health by paying attention to it. I also left that appointment being completely amazed at God and how complex he designed me to be, giving me so much more confidence in who I was!
Our bodies are like cars, if one thing is not working or not working like it should be, it will affect the rest of our body in ways that we may not see for many years, after the damage has been irreversibly done. I have successfully avoided and achieved pregnancy along with keeping my body healthy by using natural family planning (God of course being the biggest component). I not only use FEMM, but now teach it to other girls and women, so they, too, can be knowledgeable about their bodies, and hopefully guide them to making informed choices about birth control and their overall health.
Informed Choices Medical Clinics is now offering FEMM education sessions for girls and women of all ages, and their significant others (men should know this stuff too!). We will have seven certified FEMM instructors located throughout Iowa. Please reach out (319) 337-0575 to any of our clinics with questions and to set up your first session. God designed our bodies in such a unique and beautiful way, let us help you understand it!
