{"id":746,"date":"2003-12-15T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2003-12-15T20:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/archives\/2003\/12\/15\/condoms-dont-work-nearly-as-well-as-you-might-have-thought\/"},"modified":"2007-10-11T17:43:12","modified_gmt":"2007-10-12T01:43:12","slug":"condoms-dont-work-nearly-as-well-as-you-might-have-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2003\/12\/15\/condoms-dont-work-nearly-as-well-as-you-might-have-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Condoms Don’t Work Nearly As Well As You Might Have Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was at Planned Parenthood recently. I was sitting around in the waiting room reading all the literature on the walls and I came across a weirdly shaped pamphlet. Turns out, it’s a pamphlet for the Mircette<\/a> birth control pill. It was oddly shaped because it had a pocket inside it with a map-looking thing in it. I idly opened the map-looking thing… and kept opening it… and kept opening it… into an 11″ x 25″ paper with itty bitty print on both sides. Yow.<\/p>\n

I saw a pretty picture of the Mircette molecule. Some pretty charts on “Circulatory Disease Mortality Rates per 100,000 Woman-Years by Age…” You know, the usual. I was keeping it light so I kept to the charts and graphs. I came across one that… well, it’s heavy. Here it is, lifted from the Mircette page:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Do you remember your statistics? Take a look at line about male condoms. This says that if a couple uses condoms regularly as their only birth control method, they have a 14% chance of becoming parents after a year. Compare that to if they didn’t use anything at all; they’d have an 85% chance of conceiving. Said another way, you are about 1\/6th as likely to conceive when using condoms. If, on the other hand, you’re on the pill, you’re somewhere between 1\/170 and 1\/850 times as likely to conceive.<\/p>\n

Of course, condoms are good at preventing the spread at disease. And they are good as a “multiplier” when you use multiple birth control methods. But if all you use are condoms for birth control, then you’re playing Russian Roulette with your future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was at Planned Parenthood recently. I was sitting around in the waiting room reading all the literature on the walls and I came across a weirdly shaped pamphlet. Turns out, it’s a pamphlet for the Mircette birth control pill. It was oddly shaped because it had a pocket inside it with a map-looking thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}