HOLISTIC BIRTH CONTROL
(from Yoga Journal - July/August 1995)
By Blake More
A recent World Health Organization study reports that it's just as reliable as the IUD, minus the dangerous side effects. Canadians can buy it in their Sears Health & Fitness Catalogue. Hundreds of articles and at least a handful of books have been devoted to it. Yet an overwhelming majority of American women haven't even heard of the PG/53 Fertility Tester, a simple, 97-percent-effective, noninvasive, nonhormonal birth control device manufactured by a Spanish company called Aplicaciones Opticas.
The PG/53 Fertility Tester is a spherical lens microscope, encased in a device that's not much bigger than a silver dollar It uses a self-prepared sample of saliva or cervical mucus to pinpoint the fertile phase of a woman's menstrual cycle. During nonovulating times, the microscope images are round and scattered, but when estrogen levels rise, these shapes crystallize and form patterns that resemble the leaves of ferns.
Although scientists in the 1940s knew cervical mucus and saliva were indicators of fertility, this information didn't become widely available to women until the late '80s when, Spanish inventor Nicolas Garcia unveiled a microscope tiny enough for women to use at home. Today, women in 45 countries, including England, France, India, Mexico, Greece, Sweden, and Germany swear by it.
Farin May-Protti discovered the PG/53, otherwise referred to as "the lens," when vacationing with her husband in his native Argentina. "I was flipping through an ordinary women's magazine, and there it was. I made my mother-in-law take me to the drug store, and I picked one off the shelf for $30. I couldn't believe that something this easy, this precise, had been out there the whole time and I didn't know about it. For months, I'd been battling a mystery infection my doctor said was caused by my husband's sperm. The lens totally revolutionized my relationship with my body. My infection, which turned out to be a reaction to latex and spermicides, went away, and finally I could relax and enjoy without worrying about pregnancy."
May-Protti, who has been selling the PG/53 in the United States for about a year now, is forced to use her creativity to get the lens through customs, because the FDA still hasn't approved the PG/53. "When I got back from Argentina, I was a gung-ho to set up her," May-Protti says. "I saw how the lens could be used not only for birth control, but also for fertility problems, menopausal anxiety, and sex-education. Then I went to women's clinics and discovered nobody was willing to talk to me until the FDA said they could. I even me with the head of a fertility department at a major university---he'd never heard of it and he didn't seem to want to."
For more information on obtaining a PG/53 Fertility Tester, contact any one of the following sources: Informed Choice at 800-723-0400; Medea Books at 408-425-0913; Natural Resources at 415-550-2611; or Farin May-Protti at 415-759-9451
or go