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D I G I TA L CONTR AC E P T I ON IS CO M I N G You can trust your smartphone to prevent a pregnancy— not now, but soon.
The much-hyped digital contraceptive app, Natural Cycles, has come under fire this summer. Mounting controversy surrounds its claims and its advertising, but the US Food and Drug Administration have approved it as a form of contraception, following similar approval by the European Union. After all, women have been doing this without technology for millennia. Fertility tracking is an excellent way to avoid pregnancy without artificial hormones flooding
your body—abstain from sex or use protection when you’re ovulating. Simple. Except, there’s no way of predicting ovulation with 100 percent accuracy. Menstrual cycles are fickle beasts involving multiple hormones that are affected by myriad outside influences, including stress levels and body fat percentages. Cycles are rarely consistent; simply tracking 28 days from the start
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