‘The first and only birth control app’: How Natural Cycles uses statistics not hormones

Dr Elina Bergland tells Martin Friel how she used her statistics background to create an app that allows everyone access to birth control

Dr Elina Berglund has found a digital approach to contraception (Natural Cycles)

Hidden in amongst the deluge of problems that the Covid crisis has inflicted upon the world, lies an issue that hasn’t secured much airtime. Perhaps that’s because this particular issue is not life threatening – it is life creating.

According to a survey conducted by Marie Stopes, a UK abortion provider, one in three women in the country do not know how to access contraception because their normal means of doing so have been cut off, resulting in unwanted pregnancies.

But as we have discovered this year, there is always a digital solution to an analogue problem. So, in the absence of normal routes to contraception, it seems reasonable to assume that more and more women (and their partners) would turn to one of the increasing number of digital solutions – contraception via an app.