Tech companies added fertility features just in time for the culture war

Anti-abortion groups are pushing back against hormonal birth control. | Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

Tech companies picked an interesting time to start including women's and reproductive health in their products. For years, they sidestepped the issue: Apple didn't include period tracking in its health app until 2015. Fitbit only added Female health tracking" in 2018. For products that claim to help people understand their bodies, most spent years sidestepping the basic biology that affects half the population.

But over the past year or so, companies have started juicing up their menstrual tracking and fertility features, and there's been more investment in so-called femtech. And they caught up just in time for the end of federal abortion protections in the United States, a right-wing pushback on birth control, and a culture war...

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