Step App in family planning
IT GAINS 10,000 users every month, is the only software to be approved as contraception and doesn’t put your hormones out of whack. It’s also just as effective as taking the pill.
A non-invasive, non-hormonal contraceptive was once the stuff of fallacy but now a smartphone app called Natural Cycles is revolutionising the birth control industry for thousands of women. The app, which costs £40 for an annual subscription, uses a smart thermometer to help women track their fertile days, alerting them to the periods when it is safe to have unprotected sex.
By taking your temperature every day and plugging it into the app, along with the dates of your last periods, it assesses for the subtle rise in basal body temperature of around 0.3C that happens at the time of ovulation.
From this information, the app will give you a result for that day – either green (safe to have sex) or red (abstain from sex, or use a condom).
It’s certainly a lot more fiddly than just popping a pill, so why has the app managed to convert 150,000 British women, and counting?
It could all be down to new research. The grisly sideeffects of modern versions of the Pill, have been well documented.
Recent studies also suggest that hormonal birth control methods present a moderate risk of breast cancer.
Fertility apps, by contrast, happily resonate with our current trend for drug-free, holistic wellness.
“It’s protection with more sexual freedom – minus the side effects,” Natural Cycles’ website claims.
Of course, family planning using an algorithm is not a total fail-safe.
But it could provide the natural alternative we’ve all been looking for.
Fertility apps resonate with current trends