Actual Contraceptive Use and the Pregnancies that Result

Take a good look at this chart. It illustrates exactly how NOT effective birth control is and how our almost religious belief in contraceptive affects pregnancy rates.

(For a copy of the excel spreadsheet, send me an email.)

If you don't believe the numbers, take a gander at this website:
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_contr_use.html

What does the chart mean? What can we conclude?

43,000,000 women are said to be engaging in regular sex. 38,000,000 are said to be using some form of contraceptive. Of those 38,000,000 women who do use contraception, they collectively engage in so much sex that almost 2 and a half million of them will become pregnant within a year.

That is 6.55% or 1 out of every 15 women.

Think it's that bad because I lumped all of the contraceptives together? Want to consider a single contraceptive? Okay, how about the number one contraceptive. 1 in 11.49 women will get pregnant each year. Yikes. That's even worse than the general contraceptives. That means that the pill actually brings the average down!

Okay. How about the condom? 1 in 5.75 women will get pregnant. Twice as bad as the pill.

Ah, but what if we combined them. What if she is on the pill and he still wears a condom. SURELY that will virtually eliminate the possibility of pregnancy. Hardly. Out of every 66 women who regularly engage in sexual activity (probably less than the population you'll find in every night club on a Friday night), one will get pregnant within a year.

Also, take a look at the difference in effectiveness between condoms and withdrawal. Wow. I would wager a guess that you consider withdrawal to be the epitome of unsafe sex. And when you think of safe sex, you think of a condom. But they aren't that much different. Condoms are only 1% more effective.

Well, obviously this chart illustrates the necessity of education, right? Well, you might think so because if 43,000,000 women are engaging in sex and only 38,000,000 them are using contraceptives, that leaves 5,000,000 women who don't use contraceptives*.  And because of this, 4 and a quarter million of them will become pregnant. This is more than twice the number of pregnancies by the 38 million women who have sex with contraceptives. But if these women did all use a contraceptive in the same percentages, almost 300 thousand of them would still get pregnant. That's not an insignificant number.

And it doesn't negate the fact that there are still almost 2 and a half million women each year getting pregnant from so-called protected sex.  It is a strawman argument to bring up the 4 and a quarter million women who get pregnant from unprotected sex because the important point is that contraceptives are causing more pregnancies because they cause us to have more sex than we would have without them.

One more thing about education. 89.4% of the population of sexually active women are using contraceptives! I don't think education is going to increase that number by very much. Clearly, sex ed has done its job. People are convinced that contraceptives work.

They are in fact BRAINWASHED into thinking that contraceptives work. Oh, we all know that contraceptives aren't 100% effective, but that doesn't stop people from acting as if the contraceptives are.

So what's the conclusion?

SAFE SEX IS A MYTH! If anything the belief in safe sex CAUSES us to act recklessly and to have sex much more than the contraceptives are designed to handle. The result is MORE pregnancies than before the pill changed our attitudes about sex.


*Because withdrawal is considered to be a means of contraceptive, this means that "no method" is the male ejaculating inside the female every single time he has sex with her throughout the year. I don't think 11.6% of all men ejaculate inside the woman every single time.