If you have CHOSEN to not have children ...

[canttellyouwhereorwhatido]

Have you ever fallen pregnant by accident ?

I am staggered by the amount of MN who have had accidental pregnancies and am trying to understand how this happened. Are you regularly aborting because the contraceptive options are so unreliable ? Or is this a cop out for those who want babies but partners not keen and manipulating the situation as an 'oops' ... sorry about that but I don't believe in termination ?

If it is unreliable contraception . Are the failure rates simply lies made up by the manufacturer ? If so, something needs to be done to ensure more reliable contraception. I am assuming here that child free couples have just as much (imagine a LOT more ) sex than those with kids ... OR is it as simple as , 'it's no good just having the pill/condom/ diaphragm etc if you don't use it according to manufacturer's instructions ?

I got pregnant when I was 21 because my life was in chaos and when I ran out of pills I didn’t get around to getting any more. Think I was off it for about three months, maybe a bit more. Not as a proper adult, though. It’s the easiest thing in the world for a proper adult not to get pregnant. Tbh I just do not believe the stories about “oh yeah I was on the pill, but I had food poisoning so it didn’t work”. Bollocks. It takes more than that, that’s a woman who wants to have a baby but her partner isn’t keen.

I was asking PP to confirm what she meant. I didn't say for sure that's what she meant. Also you quoted a post from 6 weeks ago...

The Pill can fail even with perfect use. I'm not in the business of calling women liars, nor blaming women for men's failure to wear condoms.

Well yeah. They are 99% successful or something like that but on mumsnet perfect use still results into like 70% failure outside this board....
To be fair though food poisoning over few days can affect the pill quite a lot. Nothing gets properly into system.

I'm going to illustrate lifetime failure rates using basic probability theory and an imaginary contraceptive called "Nopreggo" that has a typical use success rate of 90% per year.

A woman starts on Nopreggo aged 18 and comes off it aged 48, so she's on it for 30 years. Her lifetime success rate is going to be lower than her annual success rate because she's been on it for longer, and is given as 0.9 to the power of 30. So that's thirty 0.9s all multiplied together.

I got a shock when I told my calculator app 0.9 ^ 30 100 (the 100 is to turn it into a percentage) because I didn't expect the result 4.2% to be quite that low. I rechecked my input and it's correct: a woman relying on Nopreggo has only a 4.2% chance of having zero pregnancies during her 30 or so fertile years of using it. She has a 95.8% lifetime failure risk, where failure is defined as at least one pregnancy.

So when people call women liars because their contraception failed, they really are being unfair because the woman is posting about something that she has a very high lifetime chance of experiencing.

That should say "0.9 ^ 30 x 100 (the x 100 is to turn it into a percentage)"

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