That was my immediate reaction to this news of the new app for the
There are two components to Glow, which is designed to be used by both of the people in a relationship that’s trying to conceive a baby. First is the completely free fertility tracker, which lets women enter detailed data about their menstrual cycles and the symptoms surrounding them to help predict their exact level of fertility each day. The Glow fertility predicting app can be used worldwide.
But it strikes me that there's rather more women out there attempting to enjoy the pleasures of sex and not get pregnant than there are those wanting to time sex to maximise the chances of pregnancy. Absolutely certainly this is true of the population at large. Average number of pregnancies is in the two to three in a lifetime (to measure total pregnancies you must add live children, abortions and miscarriages so it might well be a bit higher than that in fact) and women are normally sexually active and fertile for some 25 to 30 years of their life. Not getting pregnant seems to be a much more popular pastime than getting pregnant.
Perhaps it's my Catholic background (no, not beliefs, just educational background) that immediately made me think that Glow is simply a digital method (however enhanced) of the rhythm method. Which is a crude attempt to do very much the same thing: count when a woman is most fertile and those times in the cycle when she's almost certainly not. In fact that really is what Glow is in this first part: there have been descriptions of measuring very much the same things as methods of avoiding pregnancy for many years now. For that rhythm method is the only method of contraception that the Catholic Church (at least formally, actual practice is very different in this area) describes as being morally allowable.
Certainly I would expect many users of the app to be using it do do precisely that: not to mark when's the best time to get pregnant but when's the best time not to. Which leaves me with the puzzle: given this why is it being marketed as a method of conception? The market would seem to be vastly larger marketing it the other way around.
I can think of a number of answers to that as well. The appalling legal situation that would result from those who did use it to avoid pregnancy but became so anyway (the rhythm method is pretty good, about as good as condoms in efficacy but that's still not 100%). Possibly there are FDA issues over marketing something as a contraceptive aid. Maybe it's just a social matter. But given that Glow really does appear to be a digitisation of that old rhythm method it does still confuse me that it's being marketed as an aid to conception, not contraception.
