Posted by Genevieve Parker at ContraceptionBlog.com
I found this article in The Sydney Morning Herald rather telling on many levels. First off, the author notes the following:
Have you ever wondered how young women still manage to fall pregnant accidentally when they have ready access to contraception and sex education? Have you ever concluded that it must be only the sloppy or irresponsible who face the horror of seeing two purple lines emerge from the plastic window of a home pregnancy test? I have cobbled together some statistics to show why this is not so, why young couples who take all the care in the world can still end up with a surprise pregnancy.
As one reads on, one comes to see that the author is making a point about contraception necessitating abortion, which she favors. I have to say that I find it refreshing that she at least admits some consistency in her argument; i.e. contraception and abortion are part of the same issue & cannot be separated from each other; and that, ultimately (over time), one leads to the other. In other words, contraception, at best pospones abortion but does not prevent abortion.
Secondly, I thought her conclusions about contraceptive failure rates were interesting, albeit realistic:
You're a bloody idiot if you don't use contraception. But even if you do, there are no guarantees. Especially if you look at the anxiety-inducing failure rates of the most popular methods.
If you use a condom perfectly, there is a failure rate of 5 per cent, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. For the pill, it is a much more reassuring 0.3 per cent.
But who uses contraception perfectly? If you vomit or take antibiotics, the pill may be rendered ineffective. Condoms can slip or break. And so we must consider the failure rate when contraceptives are used in this "typical" way. The typical failure rate for condoms is 21 per cent. With the pill it is 8 per cent.
When you consider that these failure rates represent the percentage of women who will fall pregnant within a year, you can see how things can go wrong when you are trying to avoid pregnancy for 14 years. Suddenly those couples who end up facing more than one abortion during their 20s look less like careless dolts and more like the victims of bad odds.
What this article - untinentially, I think - points out is how contraceptive use lends itself to crisis situations and how failure rates are deceptive & unrealistic. Clearly, the author & I have different opinions on what this bit of analysis suggests; for her it suggests the necessity of abortion (which I oppose) while I assert that - aside from the severely disordered idea of sexual intimacy that is presupposed by contraception - it encourages risky behavior that ultimately leads to crisis situations. I'm not just talking about crisis pregnancy & the abortion discussion - the risk of sexually transmitted infections is another serious repercussion of sex out of context.
The point is NOT that sex is inherently dirty or scary or risky. The IS that sex is perhaps one of the most powerful human experiences. As such, it must take place within the proper context (i.e. committed life-long relationships) or else it does become "risky behavior." The fact that the latter is EVER the case is an uttere denigration to sex; there is every indication that contraception furthers such a denigration.
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