Yes there are such things as accidental pregnancies

[greenwithglee]

I am getting increasingly frustrated with this on a site which is supposed to support mums and women. Someone will post for advice relating to an accidental pregnancy, and you can pretty much guarantee within the first 2 pages some prick will come along and ask "well how did it happen?". Errr quite frankly its none of your business and doesn't really relate to what the OP is asking.

It is judgemental, unhelpful and none of you bloody business. There are plenty of reasons birth control fails. Actually when you look at developments in BC effectiveness hasn't really changed for decades- availability and impact on pleasure has, but not effectiveness.

The reckon 50% of births globally are accidental pregnancies, and in the UK and UK that number is still 40-50%

When your doctor tells you about effectiveness rates, that is for one off encounters, the way the % compound over time means the failure rate is actually quite staggering, as illustrated here. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sunday-review/unplanned-pregnancies.html

I dont think this perpetuation of these myths that unplanned pregnancies must be "someones fault", and us as women allowing these judgemental comments to go unchecked on this site is in anyway helpful.

I got accidently pregnant.
4 years of trying for a baby to be told I was infertile. Another 4 years of fertility treatment and no pregnancy. 3 years of just sex no pregnancy. Then boom. Pregnant.
We didn't use contraception because I was infertile. I didnt ovulate. Even with fertility treatment I didnt ovulate correctly.

So my now gorgeous 9 year old dd absolutely was from an accidental pregnancy.

It shouldn't matter how people got accidently pregnant, whether it was a 100% accidently (some people will still say I should have used contraception) or not. If the poster is saying it was an accidental pregnancy and they need help then that is it. In my opinion just give help and support or dont comment

I guess people care in the way when they ask on here at least is an accidental
pregnancy though genuine contraception failure vs genuine carelessness such as missing a few pils or whatever.

One is an accident in oh shit I got rear ended but at least I had my seatbelt on even tho I still got hurt. Actual oh shit accident couldn’t have seen that coming really.

One is I crashed my car and got hurt because I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt oopsie what an accident. When they deliberately did not wear the seatbelt designed to keep them safe.

Poor judgment vs a genuine accident.

Someone keep using the same contraception despite getting pregnant on it is the person not wearing their seatbelt.

Even now my dh has a vasectomy and I still take contraception as I know I’m very fertile. So I make sure my seatbelt is a 5 point harness😉

I don't understand why those graphs use typical use for some and perfect for others. Typical use with the pill does involve the odd late or missed one,perfect use is a very low number of births, even over ten years.

I used a diaphragm - on one occasion, it came out after sex. I counted the days on the calendar and thought it would be fine….and ended up with twins. It was totally unintentional, and I was utterly surprised, but thus it was.

Tbh OP I would have agreed with you, based on threads I had read, until last week when I posted my own thread about being “accidentally” pregnant. I was overwhelmed with positivity supportive comments and not one asking how I “accidentally” became pregnant.

for what it’s worth, I am on the pill but no I obviously haven’t been using it completely correctly. I’m a nurse who works 12 hour shifts compromising of day shifts and night shifts, this has made the occasional pill taken late or completely forgotten, of course I’m to blame for that and I feel incredibly guilty about it but yes it was an “accident” because I am human and have made a mistake.

This!

Mine was in for 10 years but I knew it was ineffective after 5, how did you not know this? It didn't matter for me because I was older so more a form of menopause support.

When you have it put in the leaflet tells you, they surely told you? Keeping a not of the time frame, reminders?

I just can't understand why you thought this. Xx

It’s 8 years now for the mirena for contraception but 5 if you’re using it for HRT

If using multiple forms of contraception how can accidents happen?

explained mine up thread. Pill and condom failed

I cannot fathom that people honestly believe unless each partner uses a different form of contraception (implicatiom being one is a condom) and you avoid the most fertile time of the month (which is also the time most women feel most horny) then you are being irresponsible.

That's just not what happens.

That's ridiculous. Having sex (can) lead to pregnancy. You cannot get pregnant without it. An accident is spilling your dinner down your top or falling down a manhole.

It's like saying someone got fat accidentally because they ate 7000 calories a day.

I agree. In particular what I’ve seen on here and elsewhere is the claim that if there’s an unintended pregnancy and the woman keeps the baby, it must actually have been intended and she tricked / trapped the father into it. Obviously that’s a possibility but given that unintended pregnancy is so common that a third of women have an abortion in their lifetime it seems a massive leap to assume these women are always lying (and to be based on fundamental assumptions about women being devious).

Edit: quote fail! I meant to quote the PP who said it’s impossible to get pregnant accidentally as it only happens if you have sex.

This is the sort of rhetoric that comes from people who want to ban abortion.
Of course take sensible precautions but occasionally women might forget to take a pill, that’s life. Don’t have sex if you don’t want to get pregnant? We could also reduce the risk of dying in a car accident to almost zero by never getting in a car. People don’t do that though, and they won’t stop having sex.
I believe women should be able to access abortion as a basic health service. I also believe that it’s ok to have sex outside a committed relationship and that couples shouldn’t have to stop having sex when they’ve had the number of children they want which seems to be the logical conclusion of your stance.

Well you can only spill food down yourself if you eat. But by that logic anyone who doesn't use a nasogastric feeding tube and then spills their dinner down them didn't have an accident because eating normally (can) lead to getting dinner down your top.

Not what i said whatsoever 🙄

I had an unexpected pregnancy. I was on the pill,took it as I was supposed to, missed one pill. I took the morning after pill within 24 hours and still had a positive pregnancy test. Living in the UK meant I had choices about whether I wished to go ahead or not and after a few weeks deliberation I did.

In my view it isn't so much that people don't understand how an unexpected pregnancy can happen but why people in certain situations still decide to go ahead.

My disbelief in accidental childbearing stems from this. :
I have known a couple of contemporaries and about 5 of my mother’s friends over the years , told either that pregnancy or further pregnancy would be detrimental to health. Guess what ? Not a single accident. !

The other mystifying conundrum is related to the issue of socio-economic groupings and fertility. I don’t believe there is one. However in our area (wealthy rural south ) it is still the norm to get married, wait a couple of years, then have 2 children with a couple of years between. How do these women have magical control over their fertility against a typical single parent of 5 ?

Abortion. Just because a woman accidentally gets pregnant,doesn't mean she stays that way.

You could describe me there... marrrieectgeb two children. Except you wouldn't necessarily know about that miscarriage at University. Or about DHs vasectomy.

The only women I know that have got "accidentally " pregnant are the ones that were using no form of birth control.

I say unplanned rather then accident. My first one was unplanned as I wasn't planning a baby however I was using no contraception

I think you mean unplanned rather than accidental.

there is a whole board of us who never ever wanted children and used our contraception properly and managed to never fall pregnant

Yeah I guess you're right! When you put it that way.

I worked as a community midwife for a long time, one of the lines of questions asked when booking a new pregnancy was to collect information about contraceptive failure. It was relatively rare in my experience.. Most unplanned pregnancies (i would say more than half of all pregnancy bookings in the area I worked were what the parent/s considered to be unplanned) would be what i would call "Not planned but not prevented". Therefore no contraception used.

Edited as posted twice and no delete option!