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I’ve seen a few articles about a family planning app that is popular in Europe.
The tl:dr version is: “Rocket scientist creates birth control app.”
The was created by a Swedish scientist who was part of the team that won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She made the app, called “Natural Cycles,” to help track her own fertility. It’s now certified by various European national health systems as a form of birth control. According to the most recent article I read, the Natural Cycles app now has over 300,000 users in the UK alone.
This Natural Cycles app uses many of the exact same principles we teach in the Fertility Lifestyle course.
There are some important differences, though.
Here are a few of the most significant:
Sympto-thermal NFP is more reliable
In the Fertility Lifestyle course we teach the Sympto-Thermal method of NFP, which uses both basal body temperature (BBT) and cervical fluid to track your fertility.
The Natural Cycles app uses only BBT. This is probably why Natural Cycles claims only about 92% effectiveness for avoiding pregnancy, compared with 97-99% effectiveness for Sympto-Thermal NFP.
NFP isn’t “birth control” – it’s family planning!
Question – Which is more important: preventing pregnancy, or TTC?
Don’t answer that! ????
Of course your answer will depend on your present goals.
From what we have seen, the Natural Cycles app is primarily marketed as a form of contraception. But family planning and contraception aren’t synonymous.
In the Fertility Lifestyle course, we teach NFP as a complete method of family planning, because we know that at different times you may use NFP to achieve pregnancy or to avoid conception.
We don’t tell you what to do – we teach you the principles of NFP
Part of our mission at Fertility Lifestyle is to help you grow in knowledge, to empower you to make your own decisions. We don’t just tell you your fertility status on any given day. We teach you the biology and principles that govern your fertility, and so that you can understand your fertility yourself.
You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to understand your fertility.
All women can learn NFP, if they have good training & support.
NFP is not rocket science.
I’m happy to see the success of the Natural Cycles app, because it shows there’s a growing interest in fertility and health.
But I still prefer Sympto-Thermal NFP over notifications from an app.
I prefer to understand what’s going on, and make my own decisions. It’s more my style.
To your knowledge and your health,
Meredith