MEDICAL SPECIAL FEATURE
Private Practice
I
grew up in the early 2000s, which meant that everything I knew about puberty came from an American Girl book called The Care and Keeping of You . Among other basics (from body hair to braces care), it taught me to track my menstrual cycle, counting days to know when to expect my period. I was 12 when my first period arrived, and I dutifully marked it with a little red dot on a paper calendar. Years later, I ditched the analog method and joined a wave of people tracing our sometimes-irregular menstrual histories on smart-phone apps. We no longer dreaded being asked, “When was the first day of your last period?” at the doctor’s o ffi ce. We understood our bodies better, suddenly aware of details like the weird headache that always came two days before the first sign of blood. Then Roe v. Wade was struck down in America, and everything got more complicated. When the US Supreme Court overruled the constitutional right to abortion in June of last year, 22 states restricted or banned abortions. The decision also made a potential enemy out of a formerly empowering tool: the period-tracking app.
San Diego–based period-tracking and telemedicine app Orchyd aims to revolutionize access to menstrual care
STORY BY AMELIA RODRIGUEZ ILLUSTRATION BY KEITHAN JONES
62 OCTOBER 2023
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