Maggie Gallagher on the real problem with contraceptives:
The problem is not the Pill. The problem is the idea, which promoters of the pill introduced and promoted with great fanfare, that we have separated sex from reproduction.
We teach the young to think of pregnancy as a rare emergency, an unexpected side effect of engaging in sexual acts. This disconnect produces a great deal of lunacy in our culture, and suffering for children, too.
Yes, contraceptives will dramatically reduce the likelihood that any given sexual act will create a new life. If we had preserved the sexual mores of, say, 1968, we would have had a drop in the out-of-wedlock birth rate as a result. (To refresh your memory, there was quite a lot of unmarried sex going on, much of it between the affianced, and, most importantly, the average length of time of a premarital sexual career was considerably shorter than it is today.) Instead, we have a 41 percent unmarried birth rate, in part because we have sexual mores predicated on an untruth. We have not really successfully severed sex from reproduction.
June 1st, 2010 | 12:39 pm
‘If you spend ten years being unmarried and sexually active, the odds you will get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, are quite substantial.’
If you spend ten years being married and sexually active, are the odds of pregnancy any lower?
June 1st, 2010 | 3:16 pm
Curious question, Overseas. The answer is the odds are the same, all other things being equal. Ms. Gallagher’s point is that you cannot get around the fact that sex makes babies. And babies do much better when born into a marriage, however much we pretend otherwise.
June 2nd, 2010 | 12:19 am
Maggie Gallagher fudges the statistics on the effectiveness of birth control. She claims a failure rate of 9% per year (the actual rate is 8.7% according to her source). What she fails to note is that this is an average of “typical use” across all people who have used birth control pills over some period of time in the past year.
With proper use, the failure rate of combined oral contraceptive pills is about 0.2-0.3%. This is pretty inexcusable dishonesty on her part. Almost all of the pregnancies that women experience while on the pill are due to human error and not failure of the contraceptive to work properly.
June 2nd, 2010 | 8:23 am
“inexcusable dishonesty on her part.”
Mark-how so? She noted that it was “typical rates” and she provided the link to the article. Quoting the “proper use” statistic would be more dishonest. The Guttmacher Institute article uses the phrase “perfect use” at .3%. How many women fall under “perfect use”? To rely on the .3% number you would have to use the Pill perfectly, no mistakes. That means taking it same time, everyday. Doesn’t happen that often. Telling women that the failure rate is only .3% is dishonest when no one uses it perfectly.
The more important point though with any method short of sterlization is that there is a failure rate so there is a chance of becoming pregnant. Reading the Guttmacher article was rather chilling in that it would seem that they view pregnancy as a “problem” may be even a disease. Sad and ironic. Pregnancy is the natural biological result of human sexual activity. In other words, it is natural, this is how our bodies are supposed to work. Women have an awesome gift and responsibility to safeguard and cherish their fertilityand motherhood. Men have awesome gift and responsiblity to cherish their fertility and fatherhood as well. Instead, our culture pushes artificial means to suppress the most awesome gift we have, to suppress nature. That is the sad part.
The irony is that artificial contraception was suppposed to “free” us but it did not. Men and women are now enslaved to their sexual desires, unable to say “no” or “wait for love” and convinced that they can control nature by any means, even murder. What happened to “love”?
Let’s add tragic to sad and ironic.
June 2nd, 2010 | 9:46 am
Mark’s comment is also curious. What difference does “proper use” make, when many people don’t use them that way. We might ask why, but we have to live in reality.
Then again his comment that 9% is an inflation of 8.7% makes me laugh out loud. Apparently he has never heard of rounding, let alone significant digits. The figure 8.7% is clearly more precise but 9% is probably more accurate. Still, it’s only a mild form of innumeracy.
June 2nd, 2010 | 9:54 am
Mark-how so? She noted that it was “typical rates” and she provided the link to the article.
Here’s what she said, “At typical rates of contraceptive failure, nine out of 100 of these young women will get pregnant.” Someone reading this and not knowing the statistics would have no way of knowing what “typical rates of contraceptive failure” means. In fact, we see what it means is failure to follow instructions or use contraceptives consistently. Why didn’t she say that then? Because her job is not to inform but rather to propagandize.
By way of analogy, suppose someone says that going to the gym and exercising is actually an extremely ineffective means of losing weight and quotes some statistic that x% of gym-goers fail to lose weight. That would be similarly dishonest. It’s not just the failure rate that is relevant but also why the treatment failed. It’s pretty well-known that many people fail to maintain consistency in an exercise program. That’s not an argument against exercise, though. It’s an argument for being consistent.
It’s the same with birth control. Being honest would mean quoting both numbers and explaining the difference.
June 2nd, 2010 | 10:04 am
What difference does “proper use” make, when many people don’t use them that way.
As I explained with the exercise analogy, it is important to understand why a treatment fails. In both birth control and exercise regimes, the treatment fails generally because people do not follow the treatment consistently.
Then again his comment that 9% is an inflation of 8.7% makes me laugh out loud.
Where did I say “inflation,” Mike? The failure rate for perfect use is 0.2-0.3%. Given this, I wasn’t going to round it down to 0% which, of course, would have been dishonest. Given that we are quoting the first decimal point, I decided to quote the 8.7% for completeness sake.
This comes from actually being acquainted with the practice of quoting significant digits in a consistent manner.
June 2nd, 2010 | 11:43 am
Mark,
You’re being silly. Let’s look at Ms. Gallagher’s use of that statistic in context:
“What are the odds that that a young woman will get pregnant during her first year on the Pill?
The answer is: At typical rates of contraceptive failure, nine out of 100 of these young women will get pregnant.”
Within context, it is clear that the 9% figure is a statement of the statistical chance that any female human being will get pregnant while on the Pill. Statistics tell us what is actually happening, not what “could happen” if the thing were done perfectly. Nor do statistics tell us “why” something happens. Whether the failure is due to ineffectiveness of the contraception or imperfect execution on the part of the person is immaterial to the statistical fact.
June 2nd, 2010 | 12:36 pm
Statistics tell us what is actually happening, not what “could happen” if the thing were done perfectly. Nor do statistics tell us “why” something happens.
In this case, the statistics do, in fact, tell us why the failure occurs. The statistics quoted by Guttmacher give a perfect use failure rate of 0.3% and a typical use failure rate of 8.7%. “Perfect use” is not some crazy hypothetical dreamed up by birth control advocates. There are, in fact, women in the real world who use birth control pills properly and consistently and their per-year pregnancy rate is 0.3% give or take. This isn’t being silly — it’s being factual.
Taking the 8.7% figure and describing it as “contraceptive failure” is not being honest and objective. It’s an attempt to imply that birth control pills are much less effective than they actually are when used properly.
Unless you believe in determinism and an inability of people to change their own behavior, you have to agree that the perfect use figure is relevant and important.
June 2nd, 2010 | 1:47 pm
Mark,
I will grant that you are correct if we understand Ms. Gallagher’s post to be a scientific article trying to define the vagaries of the rates of failure of contraception. She perhaps could have tweaked the phrasing. However, if the point of the question is to answer the question: “I am a typical user of contraception. What, statistically speaking, are my chances of getting pregnant this year?” then the answer is clearly 9%. If you re-read her post, I believe it is remarkably obvious whether she is trying to explain the scientific probabilities of contraceptive failure versus human error or whether she is giving an answer to the question I just posed.
June 2nd, 2010 | 2:35 pm
Gallagher should be read with Reichert in the May issue of FT, for Reichert shows us how the pharmaceutical contraception leads to people spending 10 years (and not just a few months) being unmarried and sexually active, as use of pharmaceutical contraception and the resulting smaller families and working women drives up the cost of housing, driving up the average age of first marriages.
June 2nd, 2010 | 2:47 pm
‘And babies do much better when born into a marriage, however much we pretend otherwise.’
Babies may also do much better when born to rich people rather than to poor people, but I’m not sure what this is meant to show.
Wearing a seat-belt is no perfect guarantee against dying in a traffic accident. Is this a reason to campaign against fastening seat-belts?
June 2nd, 2010 | 3:22 pm
Overseas,
If the only two options in life were driving a car with a seatbelt and driving a car without a seatbelt, then obviously we should use seatbelts. But there’s a third option: not starting the car.
Put another way, no one wears a prophylactic while watching paint dry. The use of contraception means that one is engaged in activity that involves an inherent risk of conception. That is the point of the article.
June 3rd, 2010 | 12:18 pm
Hi TimC!
Taking the bus rather than starting the car is no guarantee against having an accident. Even walking on the pavement is no guarantee against being run-over, or being raped. Ordinary life involves taking calculated risks. Still, it’s less likely that a woman will conceive when raped if she’s on the pill than if she’s not on the pill. Perhaps the point of the article is that we should forgo vaccinations and live in a bubble.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact