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More Unintended Pregnancies Carried to Term

Jill

The previous post is loosely choice-related, but here’s my real Blog for Choice post of the week:

This has already been blogged about quite a bit, but I think it’s worth mentioning nonetheless — and it’s worth pointing out the “pro-life” reaction to it. The story, basically, is that more American women are giving birth to babies that were unwanted when they became pregnant. To start, I think this story has been over-simplified on both sides. Many pro-choicers responded with, “This means women lack access to abortion,” while pro-lifers claimed, “This means women’s attitudes have shifted to be more pro-life.” Those both may be true, but I’m willing to bet that, like most social shifts, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

First, I’d be interested to see where these unintended pregnancies are most strongly concentrated. That isn’t detailed in this article, so if anyone has info on it, post away. The article points out that the number of abortion clinics has decreased from 2,000 in 1996 to 1,800 in 2000. While I’m sure this has an impact, the bigger issue to me is the fact that so many women are getting pregnant in the first place when they don’t want to be. Something is going on with access to contraception, the education on how to properly use it, and the stigma related to being on it (or to having sex). Something else is going on with race and education issues here, too.

Sixty-one percent of women ages 25 to 44 who never graduated from high school had an unintended birth, which includes both mistimed and unwanted babies.

Eighteen percent of women with college degrees delivered such babies.

That’s a huge difference, and I’m not sure what accounts for it. I’m sure part of it has to do with basic ambition and worldview — women who are college-educated are probably more likely to see lots of doors open to them, and want to delay childbirth so that they can seek out other options for their lives. That isn’t to say that women who don’t graduate from high school lack ambition or intelligence or drive; simply that lacking a high school degree leaves most people with fewer options, and can leave a lot of people feeling generally trapped. When you feel like there are fewer options in front of you, there may be less of a reason to delay childbirth. But I’d guess that the bigger connection to education level is the education itself — I got pretty good sex ed in high school, and I had a great mom who told me that she would get me birth control if I needed it (and told me that I could get it from my doctor without her having to know), but I didn’t have easy access to comprehensive information about contraceptives (and the contraceptives themselves) until college. The best sex ed also came later on in high school. Women on college campuses generally have easy and anonymous access to condoms, birth control, and sexual health information. It’s a little harder for women living at home, or in rural areas without sexual health clinics.

Lower levels of education also strongly correlate to wealth, which further correlates to insurance and access to medical care. An uninsured high school drop-out working a minimum-wage job in a rural area is a heck of a lot less likely to have insurance than, say, a 22-year-old law student living in an urban center. Because I’m insured, I can get my birth control and my annual exams cheaply and easily at my school’s health center. Because I live in an urban area, and because I’m from another liberal urban center, I can go to Planned Parenthood and get birth control for free (note to anyone who lives in Western Washington: If your annual income is less than, I believe, $19,000, you can get a year’s worth of birth control free. Note to those who have some spare cash: Consider donating to Planned Parenthood to keep these programs up and running). If I was smack in the middle of the fly-over zone in a small town in a conservative state, these options simply wouldn’t exist. I probably would have gotten abstinence-only sex education, which would have taught me that birth control doesn’t work anyway and that sex is shameful and bad — and that going on birth control means that you’re planning on having sex, which is even worse.

Pro-lifers, of course, see this as some sort of victory, and are skeptical of simple statements by Planned Parenthood representatives like, “We all wish to see that number decrease so women don’t get pregnant until they want to be.” I agree that Planned Parenthood should have chosen their words better — if by “we” they mean the pro-choice movement, then sure, we all do wish to see a world where women don’t get pregnant unless they want to be. But if by “we” they meant people in general, they’re far off base — because folks like Dawn and Peter just don’t agree.

Women, you are the ones ultimately in control. Don’t have sex unless you are married and ready to have a child. If you love a man and marry him, you will figure out how to enjoy sex with him. We don’t have to take each other for “trial runs” to make sure we are sexually compatible. If you do wind up with an “unwanted” child, it is your responsibility to care for her/him with everything you have, regardless of the callousness of the man who got you pregnant.

Lay back and think of England, ladies. You’ll learn to like it. And if the guy’s a loser who refuses to help, guess what? It’s still your responsibility.

We men need to be more responsible and supportive. We need to help our women, not hurt them. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to have children. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to be a husband and father. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to marry. Finally, call me old-fashioned, but don’t have sex until you are married. A relationship isn’t about sex, it’s about love, caring, sharing and commitment.

Treat women with respect. I know there are a lot of “feminists” who want to blend in with men out there, but the majority of women are still women.

Men: Get out there and protect your women (who says pro-lifers don’t have uterus-ownership issues?). Plus, feminists aren’t real women, because real women don’t want to blend in with men at all — they prefer to be relegated to second-class status. That’s the what God wanted.

I like to think that there is some common ground on which pro-life and pro-choice groups can come together. It seems like pregnancy prevention could be that ground, but the extremists — who unfortunately seem to maintain control of the major pro-life organizations — don’t want to be a part of it. I can understand being against abortion. I don’t particularly like the anti-abortion view that believes it should be illegal or highly limited; I think such a view is sexist and seriously misguided, but I can, to a point, understand the ideas behind it. But I simply cannot wrap my mind around the mentality that women shouldn’t have the right to control whether or not they become pregnant in the first place, or that it’s a good thing that so many women are becoming unintentionally pregnant.

My take on the pregnancy story is basically this: If women have a full range of options at their fingertips, and more of them are choosing to give birth, that’s great. It could indicate that women are more economically empowered, and feel they can afford to give birth even when it wasn’t planned. It could indicate that the stigma attached to unwed pregnancy is waning, and unmarried women don’t feel pushed into a particular choice. It could indicate that working women face less pregnancy-related discrimination, and feel that they can realistically have a child and a career.

But I don’t think this is the case. Given that women don’t have a full range of options — subsidized childcare isn’t really a part of the welfare system, there are throngs of uninsured Americans, contraception and sexual health information are censored and manipulated in schools, the vast majority of U.S. counties lack an abortion provider, we don’t have a decent national parental leave policy — there’s something else going on here. And birth/abortion rates regardless, America’s unintended pregnancy rate is nothing to celebrate. It’s interesting that it’s being spun as a “pro-life” victory.

In other Blogging for Choice news, check out Copy editor for Christ Dawn Eden play fast and loose with the facts in her never-ending efforts to demonize any pro-choice organization. This week she goes after Jessica and NARAL’s Bush v. Choice blog, stating that, “NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Blog Calls Abortion the ‘Supposedly Traumatic Decision to Excise a Few Parasitic Cells’.” She originally attributed the post to Jessica. Except… Jessica didn’t write it, and Bush v. Choice doesn’t say that. It’s clearly an excerpt from another blog post, which Bush v. Choice links to. It’s obviously not a NARAL talking point (although the post by Twisty is indeed great).

But hey, I kinda like these Dawn Eden-style “facts.” So using her formula, let’s take a look at what’s on Dawn’s blog this week: “One commonly accepted figure is that proper and consistent use of condoms will lower a woman’s chance of getting pregnant to 3% in one year. Sounds good, until you do this simple calculation. If you have a 3% risk in one year, your risk over 5 years is 15%, and over 10 years it’s 30%….Now it is easier to get pregnant than to get a veneral disease (the process isn’t specifically designed to transmit disease, but it sure is designed to get a woman pregnant), so condoms are better at preventing venereal disease than pregnancy. BUT getting many venereal diseases increases the chance for getting another, so risks balloon for the more sexually active people.” Dude, Dawn Eden can’t do math!! More evidence that all pro-lifers are totally stupid! (If I was more Dawn-like, I’d insert a really clever pun and a screaming Post-style headline, but I just can’t bring myself to do it).

12 thoughts on More Unintended Pregnancies Carried to Term

  1. We men need to be more responsible and supportive. We need to help our women, not hurt them. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to have children. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to be a husband and father. Don’t have sex if you aren’t willing to marry. Finally, call me old-fashioned, but don’t have sex until you are married. A relationship isn’t about sex, it’s about love, caring, sharing and commitment.

    So let’s see, that was “Don’t have sex… Don’t have sex… Don’t have sex… Don’t have sex… A relationship isn’t about sex.” That says it all, doesn’t it? Sex is for having children. Pleasure is wrong. It isn’t about some vast love for life. It’s about control.

  2. Women, you are the ones ultimately in control. Don’t have sex unless you are married and ready to have a child.

    Actually, if I’m not supposed to have sex until I’m married and ready to have a child, then I’m not really in control. Either Dawn and her ilk are, or my body’s involuntary functions (being fertile against my wishes) are. Contraception, however, means I decide what my body does, enabling me to be sufficiently in control of my sex life to actually get some benefits from “being ultimately in control.” I mean, if I can’t have sex without getting pregnant, I’m not in control of that at all.

    I’m not the only one who’s sick of Dawn, am I? And then there’s Peter . . .

    A relationship isn’t about sex, it’s about love, caring, sharing and commitment.

    Then where the fuck am I supposed to get sex from? Last I checked, the holodecks and holosuites from Star Trek have yet to be invented.

    And Dawn’s math skills are abominal. A 3% chance of something happening in a year is a 3 in 100; over ten years those 3 likely chances do increase to 30, but so do the total incidents in which those three are dispersed, to 1000. And 30 of 1000 is still 3%.

    Come to think of it, if holosuites were invented, one could create a perfectly accurate artificial womb for every unwanted pregnancy in existance, at any point in gestation, meaning that if Peter had any business declaring that sex wasn’t an important part of relationships, there would be no pro-life save-the-babies argument against abortion, and Dawn and Peter and their compadres would be either out of a job, or exposed for the controlling misogynist sphincters that most of them are.

  4. So is she recommending that married women who don’t want to have children not do their wifely duty?

    My mother did not want my youngest brother. She already had five living children under the age of 7, including 2-year-old twins that she hadn’t expected to be twins (her first child died shortly after birth). After the twins, in 1970, she tried to get her tubes tied, but the times being what they were, the (public) hospital’s rules required her to either have 9 children already or to have permission from her mother, her husband AND her priest (guess who was the problem?). She was becoming quite aware that my father had an alcohol problem, and she was overwhelmed.

    She wound up going through with the pregnancy, and fortunately, my brother was born post-Roe, and she was able to get her tubes tied after that.

    But just because she wound up loving my brother after he was born (and, let’s face it: we were pretty solidly middle-class for many years after that, so at least when he was born, money wasn’t as big a factor as sanity) doesn’t erase the fact that she had no real options at the time she became pregnant, since she got pregnant pre-Roe and had been prevented from pursuing other options.

  5. I got pretty good sex ed in high school

    Being tired, I read this as, “I got pretty good sex in high school.” I was about to type “T.M.I.,” then read again. 😉

  6. Dawn: Women, you are the ones ultimately in control. Don’t have sex unless you are married and ready to have a child.

    Jill has a way of bringing out the liberal in me. 🙂

    The ultimate contradiction between what people like Dawn Eden want and what actually happens is this (I speak mainly from a NY perspective). Most people aren’t ready financially for a child until they’re in their late 20’s or early 30’s, at least (Personally, I’m shooting for the 20’s, but I’m prepared for a tight budget). But to a lot of religious pundits, women are supposed to get married in our early 20’s.

    So, if nobody got married till they were ready for kids, then people in NY/NJ would get married OLLLD (past Vox Day’s expiration date of 26).

    In a part of the country as expensive as this one, you’re not going to see 21-year-olds who are honestly ready for kids. So either the pundits get their married 21-year-olds, or they get their 28-year-olds who are ready for children, but at least in the northeast, it’s not likely to be both.

    I speak, of course, as a Midwesterner-turned-New Jerseyan who tires of the folks back home telling her she’s an old maid and refusing to believe that no Virginia, we couldn’t afford kids at 25.

  7. Actually, here’s how the math works. Your change of getting pregnant in 10 years is, of course, always higher than your chance of getting pregnant in one year, unless your chance of getting pregnant in one year is zero (which, given the possibility of rape, is a probability that could only be achieved if you lack either a uterus or ovaries or are past menopause). But the best way to calculate your odds is to start, not with your chance of getting pregnant, but with your chance of not getting pregnant.

    First year, 97 out of a hundred women have not gotten pregnant even once, using that condom. Assume, for the sake of argument, that pregnancy is a random, coin-flip type event, and that the 3% who got pregnant in the first year aren’t especially predisposed to getting pregnant while using a condom. Second year, 97% of the women who didn’t get pregnant the first year still don’t get pregnant, while 97% of the women who did get pregnant succeed in not getting pregnant a second time. So you multiply 97% by 97% to get the percentage of women never pregnant at all. After ten years, this is .97 x .97 (etc. 10x), which, when I use my handy calculator, comes out to 0.73742 (if I truncate at five digits). So a 74% chance of not getting pregnant, and a 26% chance of getting pregnant at least once – not the odds Dawn was giving, but actually somewhat close to her odds.

    Of course, this assumes, a) that you’re constantly sexually active during those ten years, b) that you’re only using the condom, and not any additional method of birth control, c) that the 97% effectiveness estimate for the condom is correct, and d) that pregnancy while using a condom really is a random event. It might be that assumption d) is wrong, and that people who have experienced one condom failure are much more likely to experience a second. In that case, maybe rather more than 74 of your original hundred condom users got through the ten years without getting pregnant.

    Now, if you didn’t use that condom, you had something like a 15% chance of getting through each year without getting pregnant, so, even though only 74% of the condom-users (assuming random distribution of failures) managed to avoid ever getting pregnant, everyone gained by using condoms. Most of the people with condom failures only got pregnant once, which is much better than they would have managed without condoms. So the moral of the story isn’t that condoms are worthless, it’s that you can’t take for granted, because you’re using condoms, that you’ll go through your whole reproductive life without an unplanned pregnancy. Which actually should make a difference to how you make your sexual choices; if, for example, you spent the full ten years sleeping with someone who fully agrees with you about birth control, but vehemently differs with you about what to do if birth control fails, there’s a 24% chance that at some point during those ten years you found yourselves deeply at odds.

    Your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom, consistently, over the course of those ten years, will of course be much lower than your chance of pregnancy (well, unless you’re a gay man, in which case your chance of pregnancy is so darn low it can’t be beat, but your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom consistently is still pretty low).

  8. If you didn’t click on the link to twisty’s site would it really be “obvious” that the quote calling abortion a “supposedly traumatic decision to excise a few parasitic cells from our personal organs” wasn’t from Blogger for Choice?

    It’s certainly obvious if you click on the link but Blogger for Choice does a rather poor job of separating what he or she says from Twisty’s blog post. He or she doesn’t use blockquotes, italics, quotation marks, or a colon to separate Twisty’s words from his or her words. I could easily see how someone who didn’t click on the link would think that the quote from someone else that twisty blockquoted was the only thing Twisty said.

    Dawn should have clicked thru the link but I don’t think its a closed and shut case that she was trying to mislead anyone. It seems more likely that Blogger for Choice’s lack of proper separation could have caused Dawn to believe that Blogger for Choice said what Twisty said.

  9. Dawn should have clicked thru the link but I don’t think its a closed and shut case that she was trying to mislead anyone. It seems more likely that Blogger for Choice’s lack of proper separation could have caused Dawn to believe that Blogger for Choice said what Twisty said.

    Fair enough. But I alerted Dawn to the fact that the post was excerpted from Twisty’s blog, and wasn’t written by Jessica or NARAL. She removed Jessica’s name, but chose to otherwise keep her post the same, leading her readers to believe that it was NARAL spokespeople who wrote what Twisty did. Dawn now knows exactly what the situation is, and is choosing to intentionally mislead people.

    And so that I don’t accidently do the same thing here, the last two block quotes in my post are both from Peter’s blog. Reading the comments now, I realize that the way I set up the intro made it look like the first was Dawn and the second was Peter; that isn’t the case. Sorry for any confusion.

  10. Lynn:

    My point and/or line of thought was, and I know I made it badly (long, hectic day, no caffeine, contacts threatening to pop out of my eyes, etc), that while you have ten times the chance of being pregnant over ten years, you also have ten times the sex. Your chances of getting pregnant at any given time are still about 3%. So I suppose it’s Dawn’s (‘scuse me, Peter’s) way of putting it that is abominal. It’s (cycles and fertility aside) a 3% chance every time you have sex, and the laws of probability further support the likelihood of pregnancy the more times you roll the dice, so to speak, but she speaks of 30% as if it were the only important thing, disregarding the part where you get ten times as much sex.

    I’d say, however, that it would be more accurate to calculate risk based on number of times someone has sex, rather than the time period over which they’re sexually active. A woman who has sex 100 times in 3 months, and a woman who has sex 100 times in 10 years, would have about the same chances of getting pregnant at some point during their respective time periods. A woman who has sex every night for ten years would have much greater chances at getting pregnant than one who only has sex 100 times during those ten years.

    Your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom, consistently, over the course of those ten years . . .

    I really hope you mean “those condoms.” Especially over ten years.

  11. I really hope you mean “those condoms.” Especially over ten years.

    So that’s why I wasn’t getting good results with my birth control :-).

    Seriously, though, with AIDS the conservative argument about condom failure gets even more interesting, because you have a herd immunity situation – your odds of getting AIDS are based both on your own consistency in condom usage, and on the general infection rate in the population. So, let’s say, for the sake of argument, the chance of getting HIV from someone who is known to be HIV positive, per instance of condom-using sex, is the same as your chance of getting pregnant (which seems generous, since we’re evolved to welcome pregnancy and at least somewhat resist infection). In a population where everyone uses condoms consistently, your chance of getting AIDS has got to be much, much less than that 3% per year, because everyone’s condom usage is driving the background rate down. Meaning that, for condom promotion to backfire and increase the rate of HIV infection, you’d have to assume either that condom promotion increases the numbers of people having sex by multiple orders of magnitude, or else that people respond to condom promotion by going out and having more sex, but completely ignoring the message to use condoms.

    On the other hand, with pregnancy you get no herd immunity effect, and, if you consider pregnancy a sufficiently intolerable outcome (both abortion and having the child are unacceptable to you), even a 3% failure rate per year may be too high – particularly if you’re having plenty of fun with outercourse and were never that interested in intercourse anyway (I have to assume more necking that Peter would approve of here, because I’m assuming someone acting on a basis of statistical risks only). So, I think seriously limiting when and with whom you have sexual intercourse based on the possibility of birth control failure can be a rational choice, even without Peter’s level of religious belief in chastity; where it falls apart is where someone starts advocating limiting the amount of education people get about condoms and suchlike, based on the chance that condoms may fail.

  12. Kyra: you said that “it would be more accurate to calculate risk based on number of times someone has sex, rather than the time period over which they’re sexually active.” Which certainly is one opinion, but it’s hard to study. I’ve seen numbers that say the pregnancy risk at any unprotected intercourse is about 6-7%, and the risk around ovulation is up to 20%. (Which makes sense. If one were to time sex to ovulation for a year, this number gives a total pregnancy chance of about 93%, presuming 12 ovulations a year. The statistical chance of conceiving with unprotected sex is about 85%, and timing is one of the ways to increase the likelihood of conceiving.)

    However, in your first paragraph, you’re arguing as if your presumption in the second were true. “It’s (cycles and fertility aside) a 3% chance every time you have sex” with a condom, which isn’t true. It’s, cycles and fertility aside and assuming perfect use, a 3% chance for every year you’re using condoms.

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