Comment by jlturner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlturner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not true, I have had exes with IUIs and they all had crippling pain and much worse cramping with them. In every case I talked them into get rid of the IUI, and the pain went away.

The best birth control method (as defined by least side effects and max efficacy) I’ve come across is cycle tracking / family planning (called that because you can use it to get pregnant as well as prevent pregnancy). It’s simple (you can only get pregnant at certain times in your cycle), but there’s nothing for pharma to sell (it’s free!). Weirdly, doctors never seem to trust women to go through with it (and always try to push medicated birth control), but it’s easy, even before Apple added it to their products.

You may want to rethink "max efficacy" there for the natural family planning approach.

There are multiple methods (temp tracking, calendar tracking, vaginal mucus tracking, etc) that fall under the general header of natural family planning. High efficacy numbers only come with extremely consistent use of multiple methods. With all that work, it ties with the effectiveness of birth control pills. With only a portion of that work, it's not very effective at all in comparison.

From https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/fertil... -

> FAMs are about 77%–98% effective. That means 2–23 out of 100 couples who use FAMs will get pregnant each year, depending on which method(s) are used. If you use multiple FAMs together, they work even better.

> The better you are about using FAMs the right way — tracking your fertility signs daily and avoiding sex or using birth control on “unsafe” days — the more effective they’ll be. But there’s a chance that you’ll still get pregnant, even if you always use them perfectly.

Cycle tracking is pretty unreliable. It's also dangerous to record that information when it may be used against you if you do get pregnant and have an abortion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com