The use of hormonal contraceptives has been declining in the UK for years. In their place, a growing number of women, especially younger ones, are choosing natural methods, such as apps that help track fertility periods. Less safe alternatives, which are leaving their mark on the country: in recent years there has in fact been an increase in abortions practiced in all segments of society, linked – at least in part – to the increasingly less widespread use of the more reliable contraceptive pill . This was revealed by a study just published in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health.
In 2010, around half of women of reproductive age in the UK were using oral contraceptives. In the following years their diffusion steadily declined, and in 2018 the number of English women using them was between 14 and 26 percent less than at the beginning of the 2000s. At the same time, it has been documented – at least on an anecdotal level – an increasingly widespread use of apps and other non-pharmacological contraception strategies, presented especially on the internet as more “natural” alternatives and therefore less harmful to health.
The difference in effectiveness, however, is difficult to underestimate: the failure rate of natural alternatives in the first year of use is between 2 and 23 percent, depending on the method used, while for the pill it is equal to 7 percent, and goes down to 1 percent using the spiral. The abandonment of the most tried and tested methods could therefore lead to an increase in unwanted pregnancies, and this is what the authors of the new study decided to verify.
To do this, they studied the data collected by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, a British charity that runs 40 clinics for voluntary termination of pregnancy across the country, relating to the method of contraception used when they became pregnant in a sample of women who had aborted in 2018 and 2023. In the period studied, the use of hormonal contraceptives among women who accessed the charity’s services increased from 19 percent in 2018 to 11 percent in 2023. That of implants, such as spirals, fell from 3 to 0.6 percent. And at the same time, those based on monitoring fertility periods went from 0.4 to 2.5 percent, while the percentage of women who said they did not use any contraceptive method increased from 56 to 70 percent.
“The increase in the abortion rate is certainly multifactorial, but one aspect that deserves to be studied more thoroughly is that of changes in contraception strategies, and in particular the spread of digital medicine tools, such as fertility apps, those that track your cycle, and natural family planning apps,” write the authors of the study. “The possible relationship between these less effective methods of contraception and unwanted pregnancies deserves to be explored further.”