What's your solution to a million unwanted pregnacies occurring as a result of protected sex?

Great Debates
1

What is your solution to this dilemma?

The most common forms of birth control are condoms and various Estrogen & progestogen options. The real world efficacy of these methods ranges from 3% to 15% cite. If you consider the law of large numbers you must realize some very frightening things.

I am going to use a conservative educated estimate of 8 million American single women*(see below) in my sample but the number is probably higher. Possibly as high as 30 million single American women having regular sex so none of this business about my statistics being faulty. M’kay? If you really want to be stuffy about the statistics, move the decimal over one place.

So 8 million single women in America are having regular sex. If we apply the contraceptive efficacy to this number we arrive at some shocking results.

At 3% efficacy: 0.03 X 8 million = 240,000 unwanted pregnancies each year.
At 15% efficacy: 0.15 X 8 million = 1,200,000 unwanted pregnancies each year.
If we combine both (The pill AND using a condom) we arrive at:
15% X 3% = 0.0045 X 8,000,000 = 36,000 unwanted pregnancies each year.

Even if you divide these numbers by 10, you still arrive at an extremely large number of unwanted pregnancies each year! And that is out of a country that is a mere 5% of the global population. We really should multiply these numbers by 20!!! And don’t forget that these numbers will repeat NEXT YEAR and even more the following year! Since the population keeps rising the numbers will only go up each year.

Now keep in mind that these statistics are for PROTECTED sex. This is for women who engage in sex outside of marriage who think that they are being responsible. But how responsible is one million unwanted pregnancies each year? Or a quarter million? Or 30,000?

The only conclusion that we can reach from this is that sex DOES have consequences to society. You MUST consider the very real possibility that you will get pregnant, EVEN IF YOU ARE “SAFE.”

So what should we as a people do about this issue? Do you even think that something SHOULD be done about it or do you prefer to just ignore it? Maybe you think there are more pressing matters, like healthcar… oh wait… this IS a healthcare issue. Ok, maybe it’s more important to tackle economi… oh wait! This is an economic issue too!

Surely it’s time to deal with this issue. Well, what can we do about it??

I know there are options individually that YOU might do. Combine birth control methods for example. That generally raises the efficacy to over 99.9% but most people will not combine methods, and even if people do you can see from the numbers above that there will still be a significant number of unwanted pregnancies occurring each year.

It’s time to stop putting this issue on the back burner. Well, what’s your solution? Is there one? Should there be one? Do you recognize that this is a problem? Or are you okay with these numbers as long as you aren’t one of these millions of women?

  • I couldn’t find any statistics showing the number of women having regular sex so I’m going to have to use a bit of license here using other statistics to determine a reasonable number of single women having regular sex.

64.2% of all women in the US are said to be sexually satisfied. Cite We’ll use a sample composed of single women at the age range of 15-64.

Per the U.S. Census Bureau there were approximately 101,873,920 women between the ages of 15 and 64 in the United States in July 2008. Cite

51.1% of women between the ages of 15 and 64 were single in Cite

So that means that in 2008 there were 52,087,870 single women in the United States.

If we apply the sexually satisfied statistic to this number we arrive at a total of 33,440,412 sexually satisfied single women.

Now I recognize that much of the 64.2% of the women are married so I’ll cut the end result in half… no I’ll make it 25% just to be sure. That will give us 8,360,103… so let’s round it down to 8 million single women in the United States having regular sex. I think that number is a pretty darned reasonable estimate. In fact the real number is probably much higher. If you aren’t satisfied with my numbers I encourage you to do the math yourself. Even if your numbers are 10% of mine the end results will still be shocking.

2

Accepting your stats, doesn’t that mean that less than 1% of all births in the US were unwanted pregnancies? (using 14 births per 1000 population as the denominator).

3

I don’t know. Where are you getting your numbers? Are you saying that the number of unwanted pregnancies is far higher than the numbers that I gave? I agree. That is the point of my OP after all. There are faar too many unwanted pregnancies.

4

Either abortion of non-people is just late contraception (a “Month-after pill”), or miscarriage kills so many people that billions should be invested in finding a cure.

5

Legal abortion on demand for any woman anywhere in the country who wants it, with state funding/subsidies to make it affordable even to the poorest women.

6

I think you need to dig up some additional data on birth rates, birth rates to single mothers and birth rates that are acknowledged as accidental vs. those that are on purpose. This should help you either back up your numbers, or figure out of there is a flaw somewhere in your math.

Need to think some, will post more later…

7

This. And remove all the barriers to abortion that are now in place, such as “counseling” women before an abortion (which is really just anti-abortion propaganda) and the mandatory waiting periods. Also, remove the parental notification and consent laws for girls who are 16 or older.

8

I don’t know how to put this in better words, and may have to come back later to expand (or someone else can take it and explain it better)… But…

I’m slightly disturbed that you think that, although all those pregnancies are unplanned, the resulting pregnancy (and embryo/fetus) is/will be therefore unwanted. As if an unplanned pregnancy calls for instant abortion.

9

I’m far more concerned about what is generally regarded as the much larger number of unwanted pregnancies resulting from unprotected sex.

10

Is the OP saying an abortion is NOT an acceptable solution to an accidental pregnancy that happens despite the proper use of contraceptives?

11

Unplanned does not necessarily mean unwanted. One of our children was unplanned. I’m confident that the number of “unwanted” pregnancies is smaller than the number of “unplanned” pregnancies.

12

Okay, my apologies for the mistake in wording. I mean unplanned, not necessarily unwanted.

13

You listed the failure rates for the pill and for condoms, not the efficacy rates.

The solution to unwanted pregancies is the fastest termination possible, obviously. what else would you be suggesting.

14

RTFirefly, I’m trying to make a point that there is no such thing as safe sex. Many people believe that the problems related to sex, STDs, single mothers, absentee fathers, abortion, etc. are due to people not using contraceptives. It’s as if everyone believes that if you use contraceptives all of society’s woes related to sex will disappear. I’m demonstrating that this is flawed thinking. The fact is that even if everyone used contraceptives, society would still have to deal with unintended pregnancies.

15

I’m listing the statistically derived percentage of women who got pregnant within one year of starting a particular birth control method. If you want to call it failure rate or efficacy or inefficacy that’s nothing but semantic. Look at the cite I provided.

16

So what? That’s what abortions are for.

Blow jobs are 100% effective at preventing pregnancies, by the way. Of course, there’s safe sex.

I actually think the bigger problem for society is the number of people choosing to have babies who have no business at all being parents.

17

It’s not just semantics. Efficacy is the opposite of failure. The way you phrased it made it appear as that the pill only works 3% of the time.

18

You assume that those people planned their pregnancies. :smiley:

19

Whoops, my bad. The word is wrong, but the point is still valid.

20

I’m still trying to figure out why single women can’t raise children and why married women can’t get abortions.

To quote a classic episode of Law & Order (inspired by the other thread), need I remind you that abortion is legal? People talk of irresponsibility and using it as birth control, but having an abortion can be the most responsible thing a woman can do. People also talk of her selfishness, for wanting to live her life the way she sees fit (and, yes, be a huge whore who dares to have sex at least once), but in a way she’s also taking a bullet for society.

All that being said, if the OP is under the impression that women don’t consider the consequences of having sex (including women who deal with some of those consequences by having abortions), then he is woefully misguided. If he’d like to donate some money to keep his local Planned Parenthood running so women can have a better chance of actually doing something about possible STDs and unwanted pregnancy, he’s more than welcome. He should also be fighting for male birth control and increased access to free female BC and abortion.