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"Perfect use" condom is 2%, "Perfect use" Pill is .3%. Even "properly used" contraception means that there are thousands of women winding up pregnant from "perfect use." But how many people in a high school class are going to use it perfectly? "Typical use" is 14% and 7% respectively.
Things that are 100% like sterilization are unlikely options for teenagers. I suppose now IUDs might be more available.
I guess the idea is that, with education, "typical use' rates will go down? If so, my sex ed class covered explicitly how to put on a condom, the importance of taking a pill every day and that a single missed day means that the woman is more likely to get pregnant for the next month. Etc. They went very deep into the failure modes of each.
The biggest problem is that "Sex Ed" was one week. How many of your classmates on the internet are claiming that they never learned about the Vietnam war in school, or segregation, or whatever, when you remember very clearly that these topics were covered? I would prefer for Sex Ed to be a weekly thing all throughout Middle and High school.
I didn't. My parent's didn't. My grandparents didn't.
That being said, in hindsight I think my Sex Ed was trying to encourage oral. They went deep into dental dams and things.
Sure, sure they didn't... I bet if you sat down your grandad he would tell you about about being a poon hound and it would scar you for life.
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I can't imagine something less encouraging for oral sex (barring explicit discouragement) than telling kids you need dental dams for it. I have never even heard of such a device before I was 20.
Smh, kids these days are so vulgar. When I was a kid we called them “dental darns”!
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There’s got to be a historical reason for emphasizing dental dams. Either a specific STD panic or some sort of lobby. Maybe they just really wanted to beat the allegations of sex-ed pandering to men?
There’s a growing body of evidence that oral HPV is one of the main causes of throat and mouth cancer.
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My impression's that they wanted to have something relevant for the (cis) lesbians, and that's pretty much all that comes up -- it's still hella low risk rates for the really dangerous STDs, but at least relevant for things like cold sores.
((Ironically, dams are still more useful for guys, even separate from STD risks, but I'll admit I have a lot of sympathy for sex ed teachers not wanting to get into rimming.))
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Puritanism. If you gave honest fact based stats, it's practically an advertisement for Sapphism.
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How could a perfect use condom be 2%? It is a physical barrier. A perfect use condom can't be anything but 100% effective. Pill wise. I know zero people that have gotten pregnant on it unless "oops" I missed a few. Don't try to fuck with an already low fail percentage to justify abstinence stuff dude.
Also; no one in the history of sex has ever used a dental dam. This is detached from reality.
I can personally vouch that "99.9% effective when taken as directed" is not, in fact, 100%. If you take the word of an anonymous Internet stranger.
Was this you, or your wife?
My wife, but I believe her when she says she was taking them as directed, even at the same time daily. She wasn't very excited by the unexpected news (although we are both, in hindsight, glad to have the little one), and I was there when she was taking them pretty often.
Ah...Well. I'll take you at your word. But it doesn't take much - one miss on vacation, or a few forgotten, or another medication etc..My wife takes them on time every time and if she forgets we take a few days off. Again, I don't know of anyone having a kid on accident in our circle, and if odds were really 1% with perfect use and 10% real world there would be a few.
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About 5% of women make an enzyme that breaks down the hormones in birth control faster. This might explain a perfect use failure. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/genetics-may-explain-why-birth-control-doesnt-always-work-for-some-women
Condom failure rate was described by gattsuru better than I can.
These effectiveness numbers are so well known in my circle I hadn't even thought to cite them, but I assure you the Guttmacher Institute is not Christian propaganda. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-effectiveness-united-states
Women dissolve condoms with their enzymes? That is truly amazing! ( I joke, obviously) but like what are you on about? If you don't want a baby you're not going to have one.
It's like I've attacked a religious belief of yours by citing very well-accepted stats.
I don't know any people that had an "ooopsie" baby that are PMC, it is only lower class people that can't follow instructions or chose not to.
Perhaps your acquaintances are just better at quietly getting rid of it. I never announced my pregnancies until the 2nd trimester because I didn't want to miscarry and have it turn into a Thing.
That is a wise choice that most people I know stick to as well. Miscarriages are more common than people think.
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Breakage, probably. Maybe they count spills?
As far as I know, the rates aren’t for individual acts. They counted how many couples had gotten pregnant after a year, conditional on using the method correctly. So I agree there’s room for reporting issues. But I don’t think OP is being disingenuous.
Also, dental dams are used exclusively as slingshots by college students. No idea how they got inserted into every sex ed curriculum.
The post you're responding to is showing as "Filtered" to me.
If the question is about how failure rates pop up, these studies are based on reporting. This goes into a lot of the statistics and processes, including some counterintuitive results (effectiveness of imperfect use is often underestimated, because many studies only ask about imperfect use where pregnancy occurred).
Mechanically, breakages are the most understood 'correct' use failure, with incorrectly applied (unrolled separately and then placed onto penis, air inside) or stored or outdated condoms, vigorous sex, age, and insufficient lubrication being some of the most common risk factors. Incompatible materials (eg oil and a latex condom) are usually lumped here, though there is a fair argument they should be considered imperfect use. About a fifth to a third of people a year using condoms report at least one condom break, although this is not evenly distributed.
Slippage is... about what it sounds like. You'd think it would be more obvious and easier to withdraw and reapply a different condom or move onto other sex acts, compared to a split down the side of a condom, but you still see 10-20% reporting it happen, usually pretty often if it happens at all.
Leaks are the least understood and I think play a bigger role than most people expect. "Correct" condom use is to withdraw immediately after ejaculation while firmly holding the base of the condom tight. Waiting too long (or just deflating fast enough) gives a lot of opportunity for semen to get around, and while it's something only a small percentage of people report having problems with, as a behavior it's one with the clearest immediate mechanisms for semen transfer, and with the least clear distinction between 'right' and 'wrong'.
Semen just getting around, separate from sex itself is another risk. People overestimate the risks of preejaculatory fluid for pregnancy, but the guy finishing and moving to help his partner finish without washing his hands first is both plausible and easy to overlook.
This is all really specific. If you don't want to have a kid all you have to do is not cum inside someone, that is super easy to not do.
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I swear I try to fish his comments out of the filter as fast as I can. @AhhhTheFrench you may find this response useful.
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