Pros and Cons of Using an Infertility App to Try and Get Pregnant
If you’re trying to start a family, fertility apps like Glow , Clue, and Ovia predict the time of the month when women are most likely to conceive. Using them should help you get pregnant – if you know how to enter your information and if your application is accurate.
It is probably best to consider fertility apps as a tool to help you track your fertility signs. However, take the app recommendation with a grain of salt. The idea of tracking your cycle is legitimate, but getting the right details is tricky.
Why birth tracking isn’t perfect science
Fertility apps are essentially a special purpose calendar. You enter information every day, and the app calculates when you are most likely to get pregnant – your fertility window. Timing is important because sperm can remain in the body for several days, but the ovary only releases an egg on one day of the month. Thus, the four days before ovulation are the days when sex can lead to pregnancy.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know when you are ovulating soon. A calendar can help as ovulation occurs about two weeks before the start of your next period. But even that is difficult. Your cycles can vary in length, making it difficult to predict ovulation.
Fortunately, your body gives you other clues about when ovulation is occurring. You can learn to examine cervical fluid , which becomes thicker and slicker when you are most fertile. Another helpful tip is your body temperature, which rises by about half a degree after ovulation. But your application can only track this change if you constantly measure the temperature: first thing in the morning at the same time every day.
The Fertility app is a useful helper, not a complete solution
Full-featured fertility apps can track all three data points, as well as other things you might find useful, such as your mood and PMS symptoms.
You will notice that most of the hard work takes place before any data enters the application: in real life, you have to notice what is happening to your body. And in the case of cervical fluid and body temperature, you need to know how to collect data. There are books to help you (Tony Weschler’s Take a Look at Your Fertility is a classic) and even courses you can take .
This means that these applications are just helpers. They are great at remembering the data and color coding of calendars, but if you can’t tell fertile mucus from almost fertile, then the app is not going to magically guess for you.
Even if you just want to keep track of your periods, these apps will still come in handy. The app can send you reminders when your period is near, and provide a convenient way to answer the question “When was your last period?” a question that doctors always ask. And if you have an unexpected pregnancy, knowing the date of your last menstrual period will help you easily calculate the age of the fetus.
Fertility apps aren’t always perfectly accurate
There are many fertility apps out there, and not all of them calculate the fertility window in the same way. One study published earlier this year in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology found that only three out of 33 applications can correctly calculate the fertile window for a standard 28-day cycle. (These were iPeriod , MyDays, and Clue .) The researchers did not test other cycle times. “It’s hard to predict how these apps will work for women with irregular cycles,” lead author Robert Setton told me in an email. He also noted that we have no real data on whether apps help people get pregnant.
We know that you are more likely to get pregnant if you have sex during fertility just before ovulation. But do applications really help you determine the dates of this window? Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center are starting research on one fertility treatment app, Dot , but the results won’t be available soon. The creators of another app, Glow , conducted a study they said found that women who use their app often got pregnant faster than women who only used it occasionally. They concluded that the app helps people to conceive a child faster. But critics say the study cannot rule out other plausible reasons for the difference, such as frequent users who are more motivated to conceive and other ways to increase their chances.
While these apps should help you, we don’t know for sure if they will help. Additionally, apps tell you when you are most fertile, but that is not the same as telling you when to have sex. Should you do this every day, every other day, or every three days? Should conceiving sessions be targeted at fertility only, or should you forget about the calendar and have sex all month? Experts sometimes disagree and the app won’t help.
You can use infertility methods to try and prevent pregnancy, but be careful
Since fertility awareness methods can tell you when you are likely to be fertile, you can use this information to avoid pregnancy if you want – essentially using this method as a form of birth control. If you’ve never had unprotected sex on your fertile days, getting pregnant should be very difficult.
This is actually a really effective method if you do it right. In theory, fertility awareness methods could be 97 percent effective , on par with condoms or pills. But in practice, it’s easy to forget to log your data, or remember the wrong details about how to measure your temperature, or make a decision to be careful on a day that turns out to be fertile. In real life, the efficiency can be much lower – 77 percent for some methods .
Can apps help you get closer to perfect numbers? A recent study published in the Journal of the American Council of Family Medicine found that most likely not. The researchers rated the apps based on whether they used a scientifically based fertility awareness method, the method that worked in previous studies. They also tested the apps on multiple loops of real-life data on women to see if they predict the correct fertility window.
Applications with perfect or near perfect accuracy were Sympto.org , iCycleBeads , LilyPro , LadyCycle , myNFP.net, and the Ovulation Mentor website. Surprisingly, Glow came in last on the zero-rated list. One of the reasons Glow scores poorly is because their methods are kept secret, the researchers say. This means it is impossible to tell if an application is using a scientifically proven method.
After all, apps can help you track fertility-related information, although you should train yourself to know what data to collect and how to understand the results they give you. If you prefer a more discreet approach, just keep track of your period dates. Apps are great for this too. It would be great to just use the app to keep track of what’s going on in your body.
If you want to use fertility awareness techniques to prevent pregnancy, make sure you know what you are doing and don’t rely on an app to do it all for you. It is also worth considering how you will handle an unexpected pregnancy as it is more likely than using other, more reliable birth control methods.
Fertility apps are simply tools to help you track your chances of conceiving, but we don’t know how reliable they really are. This is not a silver bullet or a one-way ticket to pregnancy if you are trying to have a baby. With that in mind, you can use apps as a fascinating – albeit imperfect – window on how your body works.
[Correction 08/18/2016: Dot fertility app was not developed by Georgetown University. We have updated the post to reflect this and include iCycleBeads on the list of apps found to be accurate by the American Council of Family Medicine .]
Illustration by Jim Cook .