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.

Comments

99% effective?

[Wulf2k]

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.

Re:99% effective?

[clovis]

You realize that this is actually a valid technique that has been used for many years, right? It does work if done properly because the female body does give signs when fertile. The problem is that it should be done with a lot of coaching from someone who knows what they are doing, which tends to be a failure of most apps.

Here's a web site for people who are hoping to have a baby.
http://americanpregnancy.org/g...

Can you get pregnant if you have sex DURING YOUR PERIOD?
Yes! Surprise! Semen stays on the job for days after the sex occurred. Those hard-working little guys don't give up right away.

Can I ovulate without having a period?
Sure! Now figure out how to time ovulation when she's skipping periods.

Don't women ovulate on the 14th day after the period starts?
Yes! And also pretty much anytime between the 11th and 21st days.
Good luck with timing that!
And keep in mind that the semen lasts for days, so we're really talking about the 5th-22nd day being a viable target.

Does the likelihood of conception failure increase with the income of the male partner?
Yes! and it's exponential! (OK, I made that one up)

Re:99% effective?

[B1ackDragon]

We gave NFP a shot; I don't get too many opportunities to share my real experience with it, which is a shame. A little over a year ago my wife was sick of her birth control (subdermal implant), and being from a very Catholic family she wanted to at least learn about and try NFP. I reluctantly agreed (we were stable enough that starting our family a bit earlier than planned wouldn't have been a disaster).

We signed up for a class through SymptoPro through our local church, an organization that provides workshops and materials about it. In summary, I'll the say method is definitely more scientific than old "rhythm" methods, but still leaves a lot to be desired. According to their materials (and duly backed up by studies, as far as I can tell), time between menstruation and ovulation can be quite variable (hence failure of rhythm methods), but time after to the next menstruation is be fairly predictable for a given woman, and further the time of ovulation should be roughly predictable from physical symptoms, and thus also the likely times of fertility, taking into account other factors such as sperm lifetime etc. (the materials are adamant they don't try to predict ovulation per se).

The rules are very complex, but the basic "intro setup" is this: Each day the woman should take her basal body temperature. This must be done in the morning right after waking (ideally still in bed) to avoid noise from other activity. [Work swing shift? Have an over- or under- active immune system? Good luck with that.] Each day she should evaluate her vaginal discharge (character and amount), and for extra accuracy also her cervical opening (yup, you read that right). Each cycle, the last day of these fertile "signs" is taken to be "peak day" (I presume correlated with ovulation, but they don't come out and say it directly). After this peak day is met, she looks for three temperature readings all higher than the previous six; if the third is 0.4 degrees F higher than the highest of the 6, then you're good to sex it up that evening (assuming avoiding pregnancy). There are special cases involved if the third day doesn't reach the 0.4 above level, etc. There are also more advanced, less conservative rules available once 6 to 12 months of individual data have been gathered. It's really the kind of thing that should be handled by software, because it's so difficult to remember and apply. (I could also see it being fertile ground for software bugs. Pun intended.)

Is it scientific, and is it effective? I'll say "kinda" to the first, and "mostly" to the second. There have indeed been studies on pregnancy rates, and results seem comparable to condoms (though condoms have come a long way; high-90s% is about what is claimed by symptopro for perfect use; results vary across studies, YMMV, etc.) What bothers me is that I have yet to identify any science behind the rulesets themselves. Why three days after six, and where does this 0.4 degrees magic number come from? I'd love to be proven wrong, but I think these are essentially someone's hunch.

As to effectiveness, I think it's reasonably effective primarily because it's so conservative. According to the rules, we got on average maybe 6 days per month we *could* have sex and avoid pregnancy (aside from menstruation days); a couple of months we had 0 available days. We ended up using condoms quite a bit anyway. On the plus side, via all this charting we learned that this isn't quite normal: many women get closer to 10 days/cycle of infertile time (even with the basic ruleset), and my wife may have a mild "luteal phase defect." Now that we're actively trying to start our family, we'll be talking to a doctor about it.

In the end, I'd say it's not a terrible program and it's nice to have options. But, more research is needed, and it's far from the easy, one-size-fits-all solution NFP proponents tout.

Rhythm Method

[Gunnery Sgt. Hartman]

Do you know what they call couples that use the rhythm method for birth control?
.
.
Parents

That's not where the phone goes

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 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.

Special name for that

[Necron69]

There's a special, scientific term for women who use the rhythm method of birth control. They're called 'mothers'.

- Necron69

Re:Swedes try product because of marketing

[xpiotr]

Who would have thought an unverifiable, exceptional claim of 99% efficacy

You good sir might want to Reread The Friendly Article. The article clearly states that at an average the success rate is estimated to 93%.
7% of the women report getting pregnant, so the number seems to fit very well
93% is also stated on their home page : https://www.naturalcycles.com/
(99% was a number stated if the app was used in strict compliance, but they know it isn't.)

Re: Swedes try product because of marketing

[c6gunner]

You know, it's pretty sad that as a race, we decide to abort our mistakes.

Agreed. It would be WAY cooler if we would just eat them after they're born, the way other races do!

Re:Swedes try product because of marketing

[Opportunist]

Yes, let's be consistent about it. So what's your stance on childcare, school lunch, medical examinations for children and other aids for the mom?

Until you're born we'll fight for your life but after you ARE actually alive, you're on your own.

Face it, you're not pro life. You're anti-fucking. You want the woman to suffer from having "sinned", and you can't really say it that way because everyone would instantly consider it what it is: A bullshit reason. So it's the "sanctity of life". Bullshit. Life isn't sacred. Twice so if you believe in the invisible sky daddy who kills people according to his own advertising brochure left and right with impunity because he didn't like the cut of their jib or some other bullshit reason.

Sanctity of life, my ass...