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Contraceptive App Natural Cycles Blamed For String of Unwanted Pregnancies (standard.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A contraceptive mobile phone app used by tens of thousands of British women has come under fire after reportedly sparking a string of unwanted pregnancies. Swedish birth control app Natural Cycles, which costs $55, tracks body temperature to accurately predict when in the month a woman is more likely to fall pregnant. The period monitor was hailed as a non-mood altering alternative to the pill and, if used perfectly, was found to be 99 per cent effective by researchers. But the app has come under fire after the Sodersjukhuset hospital in Stockholm lodged a complaint with the Swedish Medical Products Agency, the country's government body responsible for regulation of medical devices. It claimed staff at the hospital had recorded 37 women who had fallen pregnant in the last quarter of 2017 after using the app. One midwife said the hospital had a duty to report all side effects.
Swedes get burned by marketing. Who would have thought an unverifiable, exceptional claim of 99% efficacy for what's basically a fancy rhythm method, also known as "safe days", wouldn't pan out like they said?
Lucky that abortions are free in Sweden.
So, you'd expect that if at least 3700 women used it. ...Ignoring every other aspect of why it's stupid to count on this if you didn't want to get pregnant, anyway.
A pregnancy is a hell of a side effect of a birth control method.
www.christopherlewis.com
The "less likely" time of the month does not mean probability == 0.0.
There is still a probability greater than zero during the "less likely" time. And that positive probability may be significantly higher than other methods of birth control.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Do you know what they call couples that use the rhythm method for birth control?
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Parents
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"I was ovulating and was totally horny and had to get some and my boyfriend didn't pull out fast enough, so the app didn't REALLY work for me."
Or maybe the whole, "I cut it too close to my ovulation time and my man's sperm must've been really hardy. It's the app's fault for not knowing that," possibility?
In the end, there is no non-artificial, bulletproof method of birth control that works for everyone that is sexually active because there are way too many variables.
What can I say. That's fucked up.
#DeleteFacebook
"One mistake, and you'll provide support for a lifetime."
is that this results in stupid people having babies.
Idocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
>> contraceptive mobile phone app...has come under fire after reportedly sparking a string of unwanted pregnancies.
Really, that's not where the phone goes, ladies.
There's a special, scientific term for women who use the rhythm method of birth control. They're called 'mothers'.
- Necron69
You Naturally end up with a family, no matter what you're planning.
- Father of 3 kids, born within 40 months of one another.
Birth Control. And it didn't work back then. We wouldn't have put research into chemicals if this was 100% effective.
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One, Two, Three...Infinity
As Robert Heinlein once observed, the medical term for women who use the rhythm method is "mother."
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The Google Play Store pages mentions between 100'000 and 500'000 installs, and there are around 6'000 evaluation.
As it's a method with a non-zero failure rate, and given the significantly huge number of women using it, *pregnancy are bound to happen*.
Duh.
(Also note that the 99% is if the method is used always perfectly. Actual real-world result are going to be worse due to mis-use)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I suspect that the 99% figure is the complement of the Pearl score (i.e.: a pearl score of 1%).
i.e.: if 100 women use it (perfectly) after 1 year you'll witness 1 pregnancy.
Now imagine :
- The users aren't applying the method perfectly (actual real-world pearl score is higher).
- According to the Google Play Store page, there are WAY more than 100 women using it.
So you're bound to see quite a few pregnancies.
That's why, in the medical field, when you DEFINITELY want to see NO pregnancies (e.g.: because a female patient is on a medical treatment that happens to be horribly teratogenic), you always advise the patient to combine *TWO* different(*) contraception methods.
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(*), No putting two condoms doesn't count. And is actually a pretty stupid idea (hint word: rubbing).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The pill and condoms are nowhere near.
When used together, they are very close to perfect.
There's a reason why the current advices given by doctors (e.g.: because the girl is on a teratogenic medication) is to combine TWO contraceptive.
If one fails (e.g.: condom badly handled ends up torn), chances are low that the second fails at the exact same time (e.g.: forgotten pill).
The only 100% ones I know of are abstinence ....
Hahaha.... very funny.
We're a specie that got where we are currently mostly by sexual reproduction. We have strong instinct inciting us to do it (those who weren't interested in sex, didn't reproduce and where removed from the gene pool). We actually are getting around quite a lot (we're tropical-originating animals, we do it all year long, compared to other animals that only have fixed mating seasons).
Good luck hoping that with all the above, humans will successfully restrain themselves to do what they were basically build for.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Lawyer says no...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
its a swedish company and pay swedish tax's - a good thing
their thermometer is incredibly basic for what they claim to be doing and I'm going to guess the calibration is non existent or outsourced to china.
They do not seem to provide any information on the thermometer supplier I would have thought it was at least like the nokia and bluetooth...
regards
John Jones
p.s. poor harry
Not sure what rock YOU've been under, but for the last thousand years religion has never been that fucking irrelevant.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know it's a lot harder (there's a dirty joke in there somewhere) but still, you'd think there'd be enough demand. I worked shit jobs for a long time and I couldn't tell you how many dads weren't ready to be dads and would have killed for better / more reliable options.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Getting to hear what a bunch of Slashdotters think about natural planning ... is like asking Kalahari bushmen what stocks to short this week.
Or something.
"37 Swedish Women Learn About Statistics For The First Time".
I once had a friend and colleague who would point out the window and ask "does *that* look like 30% chance of rain to you?!" Not sure whether he ever planned to start a family or not, but my guess is he's ripe for an "accident".
As a person who used to build software under the different global health regulations (think the FDA in the USA) - I totally understand this. Sounds situation normal.
First - 99% had to be proven during pre-market. Actual - 37 women out of how many using the app?
All hospitals are supposed to report back to the vendor and FDA any issues. Later on "actual vs expected" is compared and the 99% claim will be reevaluated. In the USA the vendor is responsible for deciding when to change this (although the FDA can force the issue during inspection).
1% is a big number when there's a million people using the app. Chip makers like 5 nines for this reason - failure is not an option. Geez - failure is a baby?
The religious and/or emotional response to abortion has always been a problem. It's almost not even worth debating four and a half decades after Roe V. Wade was decided.
To all Christians, Muslims, and other religious sects: Abortion is about the freedom of choice - which is God's greatest gift to us all (even Jesus Christ's grace requires us accepting it by free will, right?) Based on that cornerstone of Christianity, abortion HAS to be the mother's decision about a fetus growing in her body until it's a viable, living child (roughly 20 weeks inside the fetus) - at which point the decision should be passed onto the child and its fight for life (whether we medically help the child live or not).
It's the perfect compromise between heaven and hell - which is pretty much where we live today.
What's crazy is that too many people cannot see the basic wisdom in that and move on, choosing for themselves to not have abortions while letting other choose to end the pregnancy; The emotional tug of their heart strings is just too much to overcome.
Disclaimer: I'm a GOP badge wearing Mormon (Christian - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints).
To be fair, there's a lot of justification walking around for post-natal abortion.
Abortion is about the freedom of choice - which is God's greatest gift to us all (even Jesus Christ's grace requires us accepting it by free will, right?)
That is very distinctly a southern US charismatic theology, shared by many rural Baptist churches, that is not shared by worldwide mainstream Christianity. Even in Mormonism, the closest you get is "free moral agency", in which a person cannot and will not act outside of their own spiritual natures ("the devil can't give you more temptation than you can handle"), a view shared by protestant Armenian theology.
My belief is that pro-life means taking care of children from conception to adulthood. Not just to make sure it is born. If you want a baby born but not a baby clothed, fed, and cared for, you are anti-abortion not pro-life. Even though I hate abortion and think it is immoral and wrong, banning it, punishing the women that go through with it or even punishing the doctors that perform it, will never stop it. Abortions happened before Roe vs Wade and they will continue to happen even if they are outlawed. It is better to have it happen in hospitals where at least the mother can survive. Leaving abortion as legal is also helpful in gaining information on why people do it. If you can eliminate the reason(s) people have for abortion, you can get really close to eliminating it without banning it.
37... out of tens of thousands of women... that's less than 1%. 99% effective means 1% ineffective, which means for every 10,000 women using the app, 100 can expect to get pregnant. For birth control pills (99.9% effective if used properly), that would be 10 out of every 10,000. Seems to me it the app is living up to its claims.
You're holding it wrong. The woman should grip it between the upper thighs.
Alternatively the man can shove the phone down the front of his pants until it fries his Jacksons.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It just prints in box letters:
A B S T A I N !!!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I don't believe in the government trying to punish people for abortion
Then you're not pro-life.
I believe a fetus is an unborn human being and abortion is murder in most or all circumstances.
And I believe the appropriate way to handle crime is to force the perpetrator to make restitution to the victim or, in the case of murder, the victim's heirs.
And in this case the perpetrator is the heir, so what are you going to do?
Besides, I can't imagine anything worse to do to a person than to kill their child. The crime is its own punishment. No other is necessary.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
It is for men.
Have gnu, will travel.
My girlfriend is younger and totally sucked into the idiot youtube vlogging thing, she follows dozens of people daily for their content, some good some bad.
Several of the loopier girls pushed this stupid app, over the past year and for fuck knows what reason, common sense went out the window, because hey "my favourite youtuber who did gender studies and art likes it!!" the videos reeked of pushed content (as most of them do, makeup, the youtubers books, gadgets, sex toys etc)
I said to her "this thing, is a fancy fucking version, of the rythm method, which I was taught in school, nearly 30 years ago, is a load of rubbish" suffice to say I won the argument.
God damn, I love youtube and a lot of the content (I paused a RedLetterMedia video to post this) but for goodness sake some of the crap these people claim and sadly the younger generation believe, kills me. Is common sense going to go entirely for the next couple of generations?
The app is a form of Natural Birth Control. Contraceptives fall into two broad categories, based on their effectiveness in real use versus the potential effectiveness with perfect use.
Natural Birth Control has a perfect use effectiveness of about five or fewer pregnancies per 1000 users (women only).
Natural Birth Control has a real use effectiveness of 24% of users experiencing pregnancy within the first year of use. That's a quarter of women becoming pregnant, folks.
That it's an app makes headlines in /., but really it's irrelevant that an app is used as an aid to a basal temperature method. The method doesn't work well, period. No British woman should expect otherwise.
Note: Data above from Health Canada
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Force from who, the government? This is the usual double-think that right-libertarians find themselves falling into.
No, it's just that you haven't investigated the issue enough to find out where libertarians think the force should come from.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...is "mothers".
We know that teaching people about birth control and making it easier to get cuts down on abortions. However, the anti-abortion people tend to be the ones who want to make it hard to get any sort of birth control, and who want to push abstinence and not alternative. Hypocrites.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I hope the midwife was being tongue in cheek with that response... It is kind of a primary effect if anything.
If would be like taking a drug to prevent you from giving you cancer, with a side effect of it giving you cancer...