Progressive publication Mother Jones (MJ) has made no secret of its full-throated abortion advocacy, so perhaps it should come as little surprise that a recent article that purported to discuss the effectiveness of fertility awareness methods for pregnancy prevention (also known as natural family planning) instead fixated on… abortion.
Titled “Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control ‘Alternatives,’” the article began with a personal story of a woman from England referred to only as Kat, who allegedly went off the birth control pill in 2017 and utilized the Natural Cycles app for 10 months before conceiving unexpectedly. According to the article, “Kat” procured an abortion. The article wraps up neatly with an ominous warning that, if she had conceived in post-Roe America, Kat might have been unable to access an abortion. Between its dramatic opening lines and bleak conclusion, the sprawling 3700+ word article relied heavily on mischaracterizations, peppered liberally with supposed “gotcha!” moments, to emphasize the supposed unreliability of fertility awareness methods of family planning.
MJ is welcome to dig up “dirt” about the supposedly nefarious pro-life motivations undergirding the work of any individual or organization advocating for the increased body literacy and improved health outcomes that women utilizing fertility awareness methods can enjoy — without the side effects of hormonal birth control. But can Mother Jones pull off a true takedown of fertility awareness methods’ (FAMs) effectiveness, or is its only ammo repeatedly insisting that fertility awareness advocates can’t be trusted because they themselves, or those they align with, oppose abortion?
(Not so) full disclosure?
Mother Jones took significant umbrage with fertility awareness advocates’ own pro-life views and/or their affiliations with pro-life organizations. A primary person of interest was Dr. Marguerite Duane, a pro-life family physician who founded FACTS, the Fertility Appreciation Collaborative to Teach the Science. MJ highlighted Duane’s various pro-life intiatives and alliances (such as her work with the Charlotte Lozier Institute) and her “failure” to provide full disclosure of all such initiatives and alliances before every scientific presentation she makes.
MJ also called into question the motives of the Guiding Star Project (described at length here), a network of “wholistic” women’s health centers which believe “women have the right and ability to make an informed choice about whether to achieve or avoid pregnancy—without harmful contraceptives,” and that, in the words of founder Leah Jacobson, “abortion is a poor substitute for women’s health care services.”
Two can play the selective disclosure game
Live Action research fellow Carole Novielli found that Mother Jones engaged in some selective disclosure of its own when it quoted epidemiologist Chelsea Polis, whose employment history (including her current position at the Population Council) includes multiple openly pro-abortion companies and organizations, such as the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Reproductive Health and Ibis Reproductive Health. MJ referenced Polis’ previous employment by the Guttmacher Institute without specifying that the Guttmacher Institute was formerly Planned Parenthood’s research arm.
Screenshot: LinkedIn
Mother Jones additionally neglected to mention that Gabriel Stricker, a board member for The Center of Investigative Reporting’s Reveal project (a collaborator on the MJ article) is also on the board of Planned Parenthood.
Screenshot: Reveal
Mother Jones’ “arguments” are primarily ad hominem attacks
MJ’s “gotcha” attitude seemed to claim victory for keyboard warrior sleuthing, going so far as to dig up a 2012 fundraising speech by Jacobson as “proof” of her organization’s covert opposition to abortion.
Jacobson told Live Action News that the MJ author’s “follow-up questions after the interview were heavily focused on outing me as a Catholic and anti-abortion, like those things would automatically discredit any scientific basis for promoting natural fertility methods.” MJ’s trump card for proof of FAMs’ illegitimacy was support for them from pro-life organizations like Students for Life of America and Live Action.
But the underlying assumption throughout the article — namely that anyone who opposes abortion or affiliates with a pro-life organization is immediately untrustworthy, and their ability to speak knowledgeably about any topic (including fertility awareness) should be automatically written off (phrased another way, “anyone who believes x is a bad person and is utterly discredited”) — is an ad hominem argument, a poor substitute for actually engaging fertility awareness advocates’ arguments of pregnancy prevention effectiveness.
Just the facts about fertility awareness effectiveness for pregnancy prevention
The MJ article author writes “ [fertility awareness advocates] are also promoting the false idea that cycle-tracking methods of birth control are just as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraception.” MJ then quotes Polis, whose affiliations are mentioned above.
Quoting Polis in this context is appropriate since she was a co-author on an important 2018 systematic review (referred to below as the Urritia study, in-depth exploration of several limitations here) of the pregnancy prevention effectiveness of modern, evidence-based fertility awareness methods. As freely acknowledged in 2021 by Natural Womanhood (a prominent fertility awareness website, for whom I also write), “The Urritia study is a rigorous, detailed analysis. Collectively, FAMs do indeed report a failure rate of 2-23%.” In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cited this same study when it updated its typical use effectiveness stats from 24% collectively for all fertility awareness methods to a range (2-23%), stratified by method. Certainly, many more women are likely to be open to using a FAM with a 2% typical use failure rate than one with a 23% typical use failure rate.
What the Mother Jones article gets right
Polis, who wrote reasonably even-handedly about fertility awareness methods in this 2019 article for Medium (voluntarily pointing out that modern, evidence-based FAMs cannot be equated with the antiquated rhythm method), is right in noting that much research on FAMs to date has not been high quality. But this is not a reflection on the methods themselves.
It simply means that little research (and little funding) has been devoted to studying FAMs, and the research that has been done has not always been rigorous or is difficult to draw conclusions from.
For instance, in some Creighton Method research, as a 2019 Mother Jones article correctly noted, women who conceived were all presumed to have intentionally been seeking to get pregnant and were not stratified based on whether or not they conceived intentionally. Whereas with contraception the intention is always to avoid pregnancy, user intention may vary from month to month for FAM users. They may be using their method at a given time to avoid pregnancy and at another time to achieve pregnancy.
Rather than throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater, the MJ article could have advocated for more and better-designed research that importantly takes into account a woman or couple’s intention to avoid or achieve pregnancy. It could have pointed out that learning from a trained instructor is key to effectively using any FAM. It could have shared a personal story of a woman who, like Dr. Duane, successfully spaced her children thanks to a FAM.
But none of that was the point of the Mother Jones article anyway — abortion advocacy was.
