JoelUpchurch:
Where are you pulling the assumption that women will stop using the pill if they get pregnant? Do you have any documentation for that? Even if they don’t get an abortion, then they will resume taking birth control after birth. This has nothing to do with the statistic that 8% of women using the pill will get pregnant each year. You never explicitly state what the women who stop using birth control pills are doing.
Well, after I got pregnant on the Pill, I switched to another BC method after the miscarriage. Yeah, yeah, anecdote data etc., but I would think that my reasoning would be fairly common. I figured that I was one of the women who needed some other method of birth control.
WhyNot:
Yeah, the way I read it (in Toni Weschler’s book , natch) is that the extra days are mostly “to be safe” bumpers. They’re rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. Because, yes, sperm live a while is good fertile mucus, you’re likeliest to get pregnant from sex the two days before you ovulate and the day of ovulation. Conceiving from sex after you’ve ovulated is actually pretty rare, as it takes the sperm some days to swim up to the fallopian tubes, and 24 hours after exiting the ovary, the egg isn’t “ripe” anymore.
So FAM predicts the day of ovulation based on your previous cycles, but it doesn’t recognize it (through a rise in basal temp), until you’ve actually ovulated. By that day, you could have gotten pregnant from sex since two days ago. To be safe, if you really don’t want to be pregnant, instead of 2, you give it 3-4 days before your predicted ovulation and call it “fertile” and abstain or use contraception - just in case you’re a day or two early with your ovulation this month. And sometimes the moment of ovulation signs are subtle, so best to extend it a day or two past the presumed ovulation, just in case you got it wrong by 24 hours this month.
It’s not that you’re actually fertile for 6-7 days a month, it’s that, using previous months’ records, you can only narrow your fertile period down to 6-7 days, 3 of which will be fertile.
And this is why the method doesn’t work well, uncertainty and pure misinformation
It can take sperm less than an hour to full transverse the Fallopian tubes and there is now evidence that the female body can keep sperm alive for up to 5 days.
the Fallopian tubes will actually “bank” sperm for up to a week, so you need to guess that you won’t ovulate in the next which is hard for many women.
Pft, not according to this here Bible.
Besides, not everyone has a choice as to whether or not they get screwed. Though technically they do have a birth control option open to them even if they can’t perform an abortion: suicide.
There is an article is Slate about making birth control pills an OTC medication.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/03/is_an_over_the_counter_birth_control_pill_dangerous_.html#comments
What is interesting is a link to countries where it is already OTC.
http://ocsotc.org/wp-content/uploads/worldmap/worldmap.html
It looks like most of the people in the world already have it either formally or informally available OTC.
There is an article is Slate about making birth control pills an OTC medication.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/03/is_an_over_the_counter_birth_control_pill_dangerous_.html#comments
What is interesting is a link to countries where it is already OTC.
http://ocsotc.org/wp-content/uploads/worldmap/worldmap.html
It looks like most of the people in the world already have it either formally or informally available OTC.