The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading U.S. federal agency for public health protection, recently changed its information on natural birth control methods on their website. Until now, the site mentioned a failure rate of 24% for these methods, a figure intended to discourage couples from using them and to prevent doctors from recommending them. Today, this figure has been replaced by a rate of 2 to 23%, based on a 2018 analysis[1]. This represents a major change: a single rate that disqualified all these methods has now been replaced by a specific rate for each method. Some of them are recognized as being “at least as effective as the pill, the patch, the ring, or injectable contraceptive methods – and they help couples achieve pregnancy”. Meanwhile, older methods such as the Ogino method have been definitively discarded.
Sources:
Mercator, Gerard Migeon (5/06/2019), It’s official: fertility awareness methods can be at least as effective as the pill
