Guess what? An app can get you pregnant!

Well, it can’t, but that’s not stopping 37 women in Sweden from blaming one for “unwanted pregnancies.” The app, Natural Cycles, is popular in Europe, with more than half a million women counting on it to track fertility. It scans a woman’s body, tracking her temperature and using that data to tell her when it’s safe to have unprotected sex without getting pregnant. The problem? It wasn’t very accurate.

Stockholm’s Södersjukhuset Hospital took a look at the cases of 668 women seeking abortions in the last quarter of 2017 and found that 37 of them were women who accidentally got pregnant while using the app.

In a statement, Natural Cycles said that this margin of error is standard for contraceptives.

“To have 37 unwanted pregnancies out of the 668 mentioned in this study at Södersjukhuset means that 5,5 per cent of women who stated they used Natural Cycles also had an unwanted pregnancy. This is in line with what we communicate as the risk of unwanted pregnancy with typical use, and which is comparable to other types of contraception.”

What isn’t clear is if more women got pregnant and chose not to terminate their pregnancies or terminated them elsewhere.

What is clear is that pregnancies aren’t caused by apps, they’re caused by sex. It is not groundbreaking information to say that the only 100 percent effective way to prevent pregnancy is abstinence. That might require somebody to be responsible for their actions though and, in 2018, we can’t have that. So, let’s just blame the app.