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Comment by cbhl | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that the "symptothermal method" is simply "don't have sex during the part of the menstrual cycle that results in babies"?

Apps exist to track the menstrual cycle already.

Plus using hormones to modify the menstrual cycle has other known positive side effects (such as, avoiding a week or more of severe cramping in some women). Plus, traditional birth control (i.e. condoms) allow a woman to have sex when her hormones would naturally cause her to want it (hint: when it would result in a baby).

Frankly, I'd rather deal with the people in India who are injecting polymer into the vas deferens. (In the USA, this procedure is known as "Vaselgel", although AFAIK it's not FDA approved yet.)

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> You do realize that the "symptothermal method" is simply "don't have sex during the part of the menstrual cycle that results in babies"?

Yep. Did you read the post?

> Apps exist to track the menstrual cycle already.

Of course. But they don't actually implement algorithms to automatically determine the fertile window (what we're doing).

> Plus using hormones to modify the menstrual cycle has other known positive side effects (such as, avoiding a week or more of severe cramping in some women).

But do these benefits outweigh the costs of increased rates of cancer, blood clots, and stroke? Clearly there are pros and cons—and individual women should make the choices best for themselves—but science shows NOT using hormones to be emphatically safer.

I have a hard time visualizing "increase rates of cancer, blood clots, and stroke" -- it seems to me that everything from my nervous habit of chewing black electrical cables (which may contain lead in the paint), to walking on the street when people are smoking outside, to eating butter, causes "increases rates of cancer, blood clots, and stroke".

Being alive "increases rates of cancer, blood clots, and stroke" relative to being dead, for example.

I agree that the pill isn't a cure-all, and that many women are expected (socially) to go on it without fully understanding the benefits and risks. But I don't think this post goes about educating women about those benefits and risks in a way that's easy-to-understand and useful to them. "Read the fucking article" isn't something that you can say to 90% of Americans -- male or female. Creative Commons has the excerpt at the top where they explain the license in "plain english"; and I really wish that we could just blanket explain all contraceptive options in "plain english" to all men and women without having to deal with B.S. like parents needing to give consent for sex ed. and abstinence-only education.

Does your fertile window calculation account for the fact that sperm can live for 5 days?

The main problem I have with the symptothermal method is that it means the woman only has sex when she least wants to, i.e. outside the fertile window. Having sex during your period is the worst and after it ends there's only a couple of days before you hit 5 days before ovulation.

As someone who uses the symptothermal method, I can attest that there are always other things one can do during the fertile window to satisfy the urges brought on by increasing hormone levels =)

> Does your fertile window calculation account for the fact that sperm can live for 5 days?

Yep. But a caveat is that sperm can ONLY live for 5 days during the fertile window when fertile cervical fluid is present.

> The main problem I have with the symptothermal method is that it means the woman only has sex when she least wants to, i.e. outside the fertile window.

Well, if a woman is on the pill, she is ALWAYS outside the fertile window i.e. has a depressed libido.

Yeah, this explains it well enough:

http://www.drnorthrup.com/womenshealth/healthcenter/topic_de...

Well, damn. TIL.

Now I'm wondering if there is an interaction between anti-depressants and the pill.

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