Mockingly, contraception is a “very unsexy a part of science,” says Alice Pelton, founding father of The Lowdown, a evaluation platform for contraception that’s run by girls, for ladies. The sphere of ladies’s reproductive well being is “badly underserved,” Pelton says, and receives only a fraction of the funding it deserves. Unintended effects of contraception are widespread, and high quality medical recommendation is scant. Ladies are struggling in consequence.
In March, on stage at WIRED Health, Pelton described how The Lowdown is a treatment. The important thing, she believes, is in equipping girls with a bounty of knowledge—each onerous information and the private accounts of others—to assist them determine which type of contraception is greatest for them.
When Pelton was 16, she was put on a contraceptive pill. She discovered it utterly modified her persona, inflicting her to really feel depressed, damaging her relationships, and making it troublesome to work. She was “one in every of tens of millions of ladies,” she says, who “skilled devastating unintended effects from being on the fallacious [contraception].”
In 2018, after realizing that her pals struggled with related issues, Pelton landed on the concept for The Lowdown: A platform populated with crowdsourced info on contraceptives of all styles and sizes, from tablets and patches to injections and IUDs.
Because it launched the next 12 months, The Lowdown has grown quickly. It’s now visited by 2 million girls every year, says Pelton, and homes info on as many as 100 strategies and types of contraception. The startup has additionally rolled out a contraception subscription service to assist girls entry a broader vary of strategies than can be found to them regionally.
In its subsequent stage of development, The Lowdown will give attention to harnessing the info it has collected to develop providers that resolve extra reproductive well being points. The crew has already constructed a contraception suggestion instrument and a calculator that explains what to do if somebody misses a tablet. “We’ve solely simply obtained began,” Pelton says.
“Group-led well being care has the ability, potential, and scalability to alter the lives of billions of ladies,” she provides. “Ladies will not be unwell, they don’t seem to be sufferers. The issues they’ve are being handled within the fallacious manner.”