I gor a perscription for antibiotics today, and the doctor informed me that antibiotics reduce the effectivity of the birth control pill, which I’m on. So that got me thinking about backup methods like condoms and spermecide.
So that got me thinking even more. Let’s say a woman uses some sort of spermacide, but she gets pregnant anyway. Obviously that’s possible because it’s not 100 percent effective. But what if the sperm that impregnates the woman was damaged by the spermacide? What if it’s half dead and really messed up but somehow manages to make it to the egg?
If this is possible, what effect would it have on the baby? Would the baby be damaged, or mentally handicapped, or physically handicapped? Could the child be normal?
I hate to undermine your doctor, but actually there’s really not much evidence that antibiotics reduce the effectiveness of birth control pills. Rifampin is one exception.
pkbites, setting aside whether Qagdop is right or not, as a smart, literate member of the SDMB I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that when you’re talking about general medical effectiveness of something, one data point (you) doesn’t mean much.
Well, if we agree the OP’s scenario is hypothetical, I guess we could also address the question of what happens to children conceived from “abnormal” sperm in general. (Although QtM has already produced an answer from actual studies with spermacide, which is probably more relevant to what you were asking.)
For about 13 years now, children have been conceived through a procedure called ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) in which individual sperm are selected under a microscope and injected directly into individual eggs. ICSI is used in a variety of cases, including for men with 0% morphologically normal sperm (as defined in a semen analysis). Studies have shown that in general, these kids have the same level of birth defects as children conceived through standard IVF. The exceptions are that ICSI kids may have slightly more frequent sex chromosome aneuploidy and that ICSI sons may inherit genetic causes of low sperm count (such as Y-chromosome partial deletions). Outside of birth defects, a major study that followed kids up to age 5 showed that:
I suppose I’m making assumptions regarding the laws of cause & effect:
My wife was on the pill for a couple years, took it religiously every morning. Went on antis, and BAM! Our 3rd and last came along. After his birth she was on the pill for almost 8 years; until I got my snip job.
I guess I couldn’t actually prove the antibiotic caused it anymore than one could prove it was random failure. But it was one or the other.
The only time the pill ever failed us was during that small window of time that she took medication. That seems like more than a coincidence to me.
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Oh, I completely agree. When You get better than 99% reliability, then you change something and WHAM! you’re pregnant, it truly does point to whatever was changed.
It just does not constitute fact, though, although such it most likely was.
I was not trying to be an a-hole here, and I do thank you for your tolerance and a more polite reply than my words were deserving of. I apologize for the “confrontational” wording of my initial post; such was not my intent.
Well, as seems to be the consensus from most of the replies, antibiotics don’t have much of an impact on the effectiveness of birth control. However, being 19 and still in school, I’m not exactly wanting a child any time soon so I’d just as soon not risk the chance, however small it might be!
Keep in mind, any process which accelerates your bowel thruput time (medications or infections or food poisoning which result in diarrhea, or even just more rapid transport of material thru the gut) could result in inadequate absorption of the birth control pill.
It’s not a bad idea to always use a backup method even for very effective BC like the pill. And the data does indicate that spermicides are quite safe and effective when employed as a backup method.
