I guess right wingers never heard the joke, “What do you call a couple that practices the rhythm method? Parents.”
Earlier this year, a company called Natural Cycles introduced their new wristband. For just $129.99, the wristband would sync with their app and offer the wearer “digital birth control,” tracking people’s fertility based on their body temperature and cycle.
Sound too good to be true? It was. The app, and the animating principle behind it—quit hormonal birth control! there’s a better, easier way!—is part of a slate of high-risk, low-reward family planning methods that have lately taken on a new sheen in the eyes of the federal government. After shutting down the department that supervises federal family planning funding and setting the conditions to erode abortion and pregnancy care nationwide, the Trump administration is now evangelizing a single type of birth control: fertility awareness methods, which include everything from cycle-tracking to digital apps.
It’s interesting that some of the worst ideas of a horrible patriarchic institution, the Catholic Church, are being recycled by another patriarchic institution, the Trump Administration.
When I was a kid being forced to attend Catholic mass, I’d look around and see the families with quite a few kids, and compare them to the families with two kids. Clearly, the latter were probably able to have more kids, but they didn’t, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t the rhythm method that was responsible for that. Some of the former probably considered themselves good Catholics and more likely to get into heaven, unfortunately for their perhaps unwanted children.
I knew what the rhythm method was from a young age, because I asked my dad about an announcement in the parish bulletin about a rhythm method class. He told me what it was, and also that it was grossly ineffective. He knew from science and experience, having delivered many babies from Catholic couples who practiced it. So I, a ten or so year old kid, knew more than these MAHA dolts who are trying to dupe women into having more kids even if they’re unwanted.
