Health/Lifeline
WCCO.COM/CBC4
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
 ReportingHeather Brown |
ST. PAUL (WCCO) ― They look like a necklace made of 18 brown beads, 12 whites beads and a lone red. The red stands for the first day of a woman's period. The brown signifies when women are generally not fertile. The white tells her when she has the potential to get pregnant. Each bead corresponds to each day of a woman's menstrual cycle. She can move a black marker to remember where she stands.
"This is more about adapting your behavior to what your body is doing," said Dr. Amy Gilbert, a doctor at the Family Tree Clinic in St. Paul.
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The method is called CycleBeads. It was developed by the Georgetown University Institute for Reproductive Health with a computer model that determined women with regular menstrual cycles between 26 and 32 days are able to get pregnant on days eight through nineteen of their cycle. If used correctly, tests show CycleBeads can be 95 percent effective. Overall, Gilbert said they are 88 percent effective. It's important to note women should only use this method if their cycles are between 26 and 32 days. If their period falls out of that cycle even once in a year, this is not considered to be an effective means of birth control.
"The nice thing about this system is that it's so simple," said Gilbert.
So simple that it's becoming popular with the Somali community in St. Paul. Minneapolis-based nonprofit, Minnesota International Health Volunteers (MIHV), ran a pilot program last year to train Somali women about CycleBeads. MIHV trained a Somali community health worker to visit women in their homes. Of 83 women she met with, all of them wanted to use method. In follow-up visits two months later to 23 of those women, 83 percent continued to use the CycleBeads. The women who stopped using did so because they were no longer with their partners.
Of those women, only one became pregnant. The health worker found almost all women were using the CycleBeads correctly.
"The success of the program is due to having a community member teach other members about the program," said Heather Burkland, the program's coordinator.
Almost all Somalis are Muslim, a religion that allows hormonal methods of birth control, like pills, as long as they don't have any side effects. Many Somalis use natural forms of family planning like breastfeeding to space out when they have children. Islam allows spacing of children, but does not allow any method that would limit them.
Imam Hossa Mohamud is a member of MIHV board. He's supportive of the CycleBeads effort because he believes it's much harder to raise kids in the U.S. than in Somalia.
"It's important to them if they need to survive (and have) success in this life here," he said.
Although, he said Muslims can talk openly about sex, most Somalis keep to themselves about family planning. None of the women using CycleBeads or the Somali community health worker would talk about the method.
"Back home, no one talks openly based on the culture about sex or anything related to sex," said Mohamud.
Gilbert recommends CycleBeads to women interested in a more natural form of birth control but cautions it's not 100 percent effective.
"My question would be how important is it to you not to get pregnant right now," she said. If it's very important, she'd suggest a different method.
Source: wcco.com, Feb 20, 2008