Despite being 28 years old and married, I’ve never used a birth control method involving hormones. And, more than that, I’ve never been pregnant.

With the way that birth control is talked about in most media sources, by doctors, sex ed teachers, and well meaning parents you’d think that the fact that I’ve never swallowed a pill, applied a patch, got an injection, or fiddled with rings would be a sure-fire way to end up pregnant.

That makes me sad.

Sure, anecdotes don’t mean much, what if I were infertile, after-all? But the method I use, a fertility awareness method called the sympto-thermal method, have been scientifically proven to be over 99% effective when used correctly and consistently.

So why are doctors not telling their patients to use it when they encounter problems with hormones (as the majority of women do)? Why aren’t they offering it as an alternative when it’s the most effective non-hormonal method besides the copper IUD?

Here are some of my ideas:

1. No profit.
2. A fear of women being “too stupid” to figure out their own bodies.
3. They don’t actually learn about it, and certainly don’t know how to teach women to use it.
4. They want to be in control rather than passing off some of the control to women (despite the fact that they will generally take better care of their health when they have more autonomy).

Does that sound pessimistic? From my experience with women using the sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness and coming out more empowered as a person, more empowered when it comes to their health care, happy about not having someone else control their reproductive choices, and happy about their investment in a one time class to learn a life-skill and not ever needing to buy other birth control again, I fear it might be true.

If you want to know more about this method, it’s based off of two (or three) easy to check signs that you body gives you, temperature and cervical fluid. By charting the signs and applying a few rules you can figure out exactly when you are fertile and during that time either not have intercourse, use a barrier, or use alternate (non-intercourse) sex. The amount of days you are potentially fertile can vary from woman to woman, but the average is about 8 days per cycle.

And the method works just as well for irregular cycles, since it’s not based on calculations from previous cycles.