Anti-abortion group funded a fertility app encouraging women to avoid hormonal birth control


Various Catholic Church-associated groups and individuals funded a fertility app, Femm, which claims to help women track their menstrual cycles while also encouraging them to avoid hormonal birth control. These organizations, The Guardian reports today, oppose abortion rights as well as contraception, and they have previously aligned themselves with US Vice President Mike Pence who is also a vocal anti-abortion proponent.
The Chiaroscuro Foundation, a Catholic charity, provided $1.79 million to the Femm app developers and is run by Sean Fieler, a Catholic hedge funder. Additionally, the news outlet reports that two of the app’s medical advisers are not licensed to practice in the US.
The Femm app works similarly to other fertility apps by allowing women to input their menstrual cycle data, including when they have their period, their reproductive goals, when they’ve had sex, and other observational data. While users can input their birth control method, the app says the “natural” way for women to avoid pregnancy is to learn about and manage their fertility cycle. The app also encourages women to visit its own network of physicians for hormone tests, which it claims can diagnose “underlying” medical disorders.
The Guardian says Femm might be the first ideologically backed fertility app, although Anna Halpine, CEO of the Femm Foundation, told the outlet that the app’s affiliation to anti-abortion advocates doesn’t matter. “Femm has never commented on the abortion issue and doesn’t work in that area,” Halpine says. “Femm is an organization committed to expanding information research and knowledge about women’s reproductive health around the world.”
The Guardian reports the app has been downloaded 400,000 times and speaks to the reality that fertility apps often collect extremely sensitive information. Users aren’t aware who these apps’ creators might be or how they’re funded. While people often trust the apps they find in either the Play Store or App Store, they could actually have a political bent that might affect the advice they give, especially around sensitive health data. And in this situation, we now have proof.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Linktree’s free workaround lets you add multiple links to your Instagram bio

Image
Instagram only gives you one opportunity to link to outside resources inside its photo sharing platform. This might not be a problem for a majority of the users, but for those wanting a little more customization and even more options, it leaves much to be desired. Enter  Linktree , a free tool for Instagram designed to improve traffic to your outside link, be it a blog, portfolio, or store. How it works is fairly straightforward. After connecting Linktree to your Instagram profile, you’ll receive a single link to place in your Instagram bio. Once that link in place, you can customize what it’s linked to within your browser, be it a single website, or a collection of sites you’re looking to direct followers to Say you’re a photographer who’s using Instagram as a marketing tool for your wedding photography. Using Linktree, you can direct Instagram followers to your blog, your portfolio site, and even your other social media accounts. Until now, you would’ve been stuck c...
Read more

EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE PIXEL 4, THE MOST-LEAKED PHONE EVER

Image
Google’s  Pixel 3 might have been the  most-leaked phone in history . Long before its unveiling, we knew practically everything about it from unboxing videos, photo comparisons, even a full review of the device. Surely, for the Pixel 4, Google would clamp down on leaks to leave some surprises for its debut on  October 15th , right? Let’s just say, if that was the plan, it didn’t exactly work out. We’ve now seen the Pixel 4 XL from every angle and in three different colors. At least seven different sources have touched this phone, many of them confirming the same specs. We not only know which cameras it’ll have, but also what they may be capable of, including air gestures (go figure). That doesn’t even count information Google has already shared  on purpose. So if you want to know almost everything about the Pixel 4 nearly a month before it’s announced, buckle up. We’ve sifted through all of the rumors and information we can find to compile everything we know —...
Read more

Stable Android 10 starts hitting the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ (Update: Canada)

Image
UPDATE  1 : 2019/12/16 4:35AM PST Previous rollouts UPDATE  2 : 2020/01/06 2:15AM PST Canada Two weeks after the  Galaxy S10 line received its stable One UI 2.0 build , it’s time for the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ to get the latest Android flavor. According to a report by  SamMobile , the two late-2019 Samsung flagships are receiving the Android 10 update in Germany, although the rollout is limited to a small group of beta testers. This stable release follows a  five-round beta testing  that concluded just a couple of days ago. Samsung is rolling out the stable build only to its beta testers in Germany to possibly look out for any major bug. Besides SamMobile, the confirmation also comes from  some Redditors  who got the update in Germany just a few hours back. The same Reddit users also mention that Google Pay remains broken even after installing this final Android 10 firmware, although it wasn’t immediately clear how widespread t...
Read more