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... Both of our sons were conceived as planned...good things come to those who know what they're doing. Fortunately I never experienced any unintended incidents during those times when I used condoms either. At the risk of sounding elitist though, I suspect there are lots of people around who are not as careful and responsible as you (well technically, your husband) and I. Accidents can happen, and I believe even some of the condom manufacturers have given a range of 10 to 20 percent as a rate at which condoms can fail to provide physical protection. It seems to me unconscionable that in advocating some fancied sexual nirvana anyone would continue to push condoms as representing "safe sex" without at least acknowledging both this rate of physical failure as well as the "leakage" rate noted in some of the previous posts here, given that the very real possibility in any failure is not simply a few anxious weeks hoping that someone's next period will finally arrive or an unplanned pregnancy, but a very unpleasant death.....

Thank you for your reasonable post.

However, I think we are speaking at cross-purposes.

On the one hand is the straw man of "safe sex." Probably should be called "safer sex than sex without a condom" and it should be made perfectly clear that abstinence is 100% effective if you abstain 100% of the time. Unfortunately most people don't abstain 100% of the time, not even priests.

On the other hand is the absolute cat's breakfast that is being made with the statistics. I posted way upstream that according to NIH, if one uses a condom 100% of the time, while having sex with a person who is HIV positive, the chance of seroconversion is 0.9% in 100 man years. Statistics from the NIH, CDC, and groups like that, are vetted very thoroughly by people with advanced training in statistics and epidemiology.

Nevertheless, posters who don't understand statistics, period, banty about 80% failure rates. I hope you understand that this doesn't mean 80% failure rates per act of intercourse.

I doubt very much that the priests and nuns in Africa understand statistics any better than most of the posters on the thread, but they really shouldn't be giving advice about things they don't understand.

At any rate, it's another beautiful day. Don't let it get away.