In my first book, The Fifth Vital Sign, I argue that the menstrual cycle is an important vital sign

that we should be paying attention to. I argue that your menstrual cycle is important regardless

of whether or not you're actively trying to have babies now. And I also argue that charting your

cycle using fertility awareness method tools is an essential step in truly understanding what's happening

in your menstrual cycle. If you haven't ground a copy of the fifth vital sign, you can read the first

chapter for free over at the fifth vital sign book.com. And did you know that you can listen to the fifth

vital sign for free when you sign up for a 30-day trial with Audible, head over to

fertility friday.com slash audible for details. That's fertility friday.com slash audible.

This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 550.

Today I'm sharing another brand new episode in the FAM research series.

And I'm sharing a paper that is delving into an interesting question.

How do women really feel about hormonal birth control?

So this study is largely a qualitative study in that they had these women complete a questionnaire about how they felt about contraceptives. And so we're going to get

into that in a whole lot of detail in today's episode.

The title of the study that we're going to be getting into today is called

Contraception Use and Attitudes, Women's Concerns, Regarding Hormonal Contraception, and Copper

Intrateran Devices.

So the researchers were specifically looking at how women are feeling about contraception, as well as the copper IUD in particular.

One of the most interesting things I find when reading research is trying to understand the researchers' perspective or understand the reasons why they wanted to conduct the study.

And we'll talk about that as we go through the paper.

But essentially, overall, it seems as though the researchers wanted to have a better

understanding of the women in particular who have concerns about contraception.

...