Why Everyone is Getting Pregnant When Using Fertility Tracking Apps as Contraception

Who is responsible for these unintended pregnancies? The apps? The users? Education? The government?

Hi there,

Buckle up, she’s about to rant. You may need to click “view entire message” at the bottom if the email gets cut off.

A fellow YouTuber friend of mine recently did some sponsored work with Natural Cycles (no shade here, I’ve worked with them before!) and one day she texted me with a bunch of screenshots from her comments section of people saying they had used it as contraception and well, oops… got pregnant.

I then proceeded to send her very passionate voice notes about how these apps actually work, who they work for and who they don’t and how the fertility awareness method (FAM) actually works. Bear in mind I am no fertility expert. You can see my own learning journey in this video here where I tried a bunch of different fertility tracking apps when I was trying to get pregnant and spoke to a FAM expert about the OG paper method.

But I just want to share with you the knowledge that I do have and some thoughts on who is responsible for all these unintended pregnancies…

The kind of apps I’m talking about are the ones where you input your temperature reading every morning and then the app interprets that data and tells you if you are fertile or not and then you can proceed accordingly... Firstly, I love that this exists as a non-hormonal option for people and I love that people are getting to know their bodies better HOWEVER, here are the issues:

This method only works for people who have a certain lifestyle - for the data interpretation to be accurate you need to have been using it for at least 3 months and you need to be a pretty consistent and regular sleeper, waking up around the same time and not have other things that could interfere with your readings like being ill or hungover.

Tracking your temperature gives you ovulation info after not before your fertile window - you are fertile for up to a week before you ovulate. When you get your ovulation spike in temperature this means that you have just been fertile, not that you are about to be. If you are only tracking your temperature you need to be aware of this and even if you have a very regular cycle and you/the app can predict your ovulation, you never know, one month you might ovulate early and you won’t know UNTIL IT’S ALREADY TOO LATE!

The apps don’t use cervical fluid data - one way to know when you are actually in your fertile window and leading up to ovulation is by tracking your cervical fluid (discharge). This is a lot harder than just taking your temperature and putting it in an app. It requires a lot more education, observation and practice. Most apps have the option to track this but it’s not exactly encouraged and that data doesn’t feed into their algorithms when it comes to telling you if you are fertile or not. As far as I’m aware, only temperature is considered.

So what’s going on here? Are users not reading the small print? Are the apps not educating their users well enough? Did our sex education completely fail us? A bit of yes to all of the above, really.

If you REALLY DON’T want to get pregnant, I would not recommend using this method as contraception unless you’ve had expert guidance and you really know what you’re doing and you are checking your knickers.

If you’re just curious about your menstrual cycle, will still be using condoms when you’re fertile and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you got preggers, go at it.

The main problem I see here is that we are outsourcing our fertility and family planning to an app rather than having an active involvement in the process. The app I personally use and highly recommend is Read Your Body, they are a community-driven, female-led non-profit. It’s an app version of the paper based method and you input the data AND you also tell the app how to interpret that data rather than the app doing the interpreting for you. Granted this means having a bit more knowledge about FAM but they also have loads of great resources to help you learn. AND the app is way more customisable in terms of what you want to track if you’re also interested in tracking other health and lifestyle things too.

Thanks for reading my passionate lil speech about contraception apps. This conversation comes up a lot with my friends so I wanted to spread the word!

🌻Patreon Push - I’m running an discount on annual memberships! If you sign up for a whole year rather than monthly you get 16% off (this is the max Patreon will let you set the discount at). This offer runs until 15th July and then it’ll go back to the usual 8% discount. So if are interested in joining the Patreon and are able to do so for a whole year, it’s never been cheaper! And watch this space for a lot more fun Patreon things! 👀

💕 Blogger on a Pole - I went to Eroticon in June which is a conference for sex writers and content creators and it felt so good being in the same room with a bunch of sex nerds again! One person I met for the first time who I want to tell you about is the incredible Dr Carolina Are/Hades aka Blogger on a Pole. She’s a pole dancer, blogger, academic and activist. Her research is into social media platforms and censorship when it comes to sex content and she is a force to be reckoned with. She was so lovely and her work is so interesting and important to this community.

An anonymous reader wanted to share The Great Sperm Race - a documentary about the journey sperm goes on that apparently many Americans watched in sex ed. It’s from 2009 and I think you might be able to find the whole thing on YouTube but this is just the intro clip. They got hundreds of people dressed in white running and swimming pretending to be sperm (?!) along with some very dramatic music. Has anyone seen this doc? It looks absolutely wild 😅

If you’d like to submit your own sex fact for the group in our sexy show and tell then you can submit here!

👗 Big Sister Swap! - I recently tried this second hand styling service where you can also pass on (swap) your own pre-loved clothes. I’ve been loving wearing the pieces I got and you can see the whole process of filling in the style form and trying on the items sent to me in a recent video!

Some folks pedantically commented on the fact I was doing my mid year goals in June when really it’s not mid year until the end of June. WELL, now it’s July, let me share with you again my mid year goals video in case you missed it 😅

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Thanks for reading, hope you're well!

All the best,

Hannah xxx