Effectiveness of Contraceptives Methods/Maggie GallagherFamily Planning Perspectives, Volume 31, Number 2, March/April 1999
"Contraceptive Failure Rates: New Estimates From the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth" By Haishan Fu, Jacqueline E. Darroch, Taylor Haas and Nalini Ranjit ". . .Results: When contraceptive methods are ranked by effectiveness over the first 12 months of use (corrected for abortion underreporting), the implant and injectables have the lowest failure rates (2-4%), followed by the pill (9%), the diaphragm and the cervical cap (13%), the male condom (15%), periodic abstinence (22%), withdrawal (26%) and spermicides (28%). In general, failure rates are highest among cohabiting and other unmarried women, among those with an annual family income below 200% of the federal poverty level, among black and Hispanic women, among adolescents and among women in their 20s. For example, adolescent women who are not married but are cohabiting experience a failure rate of about 47% in the first year of contraceptive use, while the 12-month failure rate among married women aged 30 and older is only 8%. Black women have a contraceptive failure rate of about 20%, and this rate does not vary by family income; in contrast, overall 12-month rates are lower among Hispanic women (16%) and white women (11%), but vary by income, with poorer women having substantially greater failure rates than more affluent women. . ."
posted by maggie at
4:38 PM | link
It's important to add this quote to your statistics:
"Unintended pregnancies among women practicing natural methods are primarily related to user error. A sizable but unknown portion of the unintended pregnancies is attributable to improper teaching and poor use of the methods. Experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) suspect that among users of NFP, sexual-risk taking during fertile days--that is, having intercourse even when they know the woman is fertile--accounts for more unintended pregnancy than does inability to accurately identify the fertile time."
In other words: A lot of the "unintended" pregnancies counted really aren't "unintended" at all.
And, many of the statistics you're quoting (such as the one for periodic abstinence) doesn't differentiate between method. So, they’re basically counting the rhythm method in with sympto-thermal.
My point is: NFP works quite well for those who wish to use it to avoid pregnancy. They just have to follow the rules.
NFP is, it seems to me, a perfectly good and viable method; it's just that, like other methods, it works better for some couples than others.
I've done the charting, and compared notes with others who have done it, and these are the things I've noticed:
1) People seem to vary a lot in how visible, regular, and easy to observe their various signs are. I, for example, found the mucus observation thoroughly unworkable, but my basal body temperature charts kept pretty consistent patterns. Some people say they can really easily tell when they're ovulating, and some say the opposite. I don't think it's only that the people who can tell readily are trying harder; I think people also have different bodies to work with.
2) For me, personally, it is very noticeable the way my sex drive peaks right when the chart says I ought to be ovulating (sorry if this is TMI). Which isn't an issue for us, given that we're not particularly fertile anyway, but I can see where it could be an issue for other couples.
If I personally had to choose only between using NFP and using the pill (in a hypothetical world where no other contraceptives were available), I'd pick NFP - but that's because I can get a regular chart and can't tolerate the pill's side effects. It's not for any moral reason, and I fully support the many women who would make exactly the opposite decision. Besides, if I were using NFP to avoid pregnancy, I wouldn't be doing it the way the Church would want me to; I'd just go ahead and have non-penetrative sex during the fertile period.
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