Posted on 07/11/2013 1:20:45 PM PDT by dangus
Failure rates of common birth control methods:
Symptom-based fertility awareness ("modern Natural Family Planning"): 1.8%
Cervical cap: 6.7%
Combined oral contraceptive pill: 8-9%
Note: "Combined" oral contraceptive pills combine estrogen-based drugs with abortifacients. So without "undetected miscarriages" (i.e., dead babies), this rate would be higher.
Ortho-Evra patch: 8-9%
Nuva Ring: 8-9%
Diaphragm: 12-16% (depending on source)
Male Latex Condom: 15-18% (spermicide-treated, depending on source)
Coitus Interruptus: 18-22% (depending on source)
Rhythm Method: 24-25% (depending on source)
Contraceptive Sponge: 24-32% (depending on whether the woman had been previously pregnant)
Spermicide: 28% (without condom)
Please note the following:
> Condom use is no more effective than coitus interruptus.
> An 18% failure rate does NOT mean that only 18% of women who use this method will ever get pregnant. It means that it reduces pregnancies 82%. So if a women would normally get pregnant after an average of three months without using a condom, she will now get pregnant after only sixteen months.
> Even presuming failure rates are completely independent, using a male condom with a contraceptive sponge combined is still THREE times LESS effective than modern NFP. (15% * 32% is 4.8%, compared to 1.6%)
Now, I believe that you should consider "typical-use" failure rates. But a lot of people reading this are probably jumping out of their seats to deny that condoms have a 18% failure rate. But the "perfect use" failure rate is still higher than the typical-use failure rate for modern NFP, and still three times higher than perfect-use NFP. And I believe that "perfect use" is completely unrealistic: the male partner has to hold the condom on with his hand while he does a one-hand pushup over his partner. And no double dipping without showering between acts!
Also worth noting, the standard-days rhythm method, carefully used, has a failure rate LOWER than the typical-use condoms, plan B, contraceptive sponges, combined diaphragm and spermicide, Nuva Ring, or combined oral-use contraception, and even perfectly used contraceptive sponges, cervical caps, diaphragms, Plan B, or common applications of spermicide.
So why are so many people so convinced that artificial contraception is necessary to prevent overpopulation?
I believe the problem is this: NFP reminds people of the need for responsibility. But modern sexuality is all about compulsivity. What artificial contraception provides
I hate PP and would never use them as a source.
Now, you seem to be coming around to our discussion that it’s about misuse of birth control methods - not the methods themselves.
As I said privately, we would not be having this discussion if these methods failed. We are witnessing the death of the West and that is directly because of effective birth control.
Real world failure rate is the only one that matters since last I checked we don’t live in a perfect world.
Condoms are notoriously ineffective in real world usage regardless of breathless protestations to the contrary. Do a Google Scholar search on condom failure rate and 95% of the journal articles bemoan the dismal failure rate and try to understand it in the face of statistics that show much higher rates for so called perfect use.
Nobody stops to even think that maybe the method and mentality that goes with it contributes to the real use stats.
Bingo! Give that man a ceeegar!
You don’t question the agenda of the main stream medical media when it comes to the subject of promoting sexual behavior by claiming effective rates for contraceptives far higher than what can be expected in real world use? I thought this was a conservative forum...
Not so odd is that you ignored the citations in the article if you read it at all.
I didn’t see anything about an agenda in the article, just a few comments and a chart. If you can peer deeply into that and find an agenda, do so.
And like yourself they claim real world participants in their statistics. Do you have an agenda or are you a neutral commentator?
NOW “the mainstream medical media” is trustworthy in your view? And without an agenda? When did this happen? Condom usage is claimed to be as effective so why not promote it?
Funny you should mention antibiotics. I have three grand children conceived while their mothers were taking the pill...and antibiotics at the same time. Apparently the antibiotics affected the efficacy of the pill. I wouldn't mention this if it had only happened once or to one of them, but the correlation is high enough to suggest causation.
YMMV
So, along freshwater rivers which use river water for a water source, the male population is essentially consuming excreted estrogen in trace amounts from the use of the pill upstream....I wonder if the population of gender confused humans downstream is higher in proportion to the population than upstream.
This is a fairly well known causation.
Why Do Antibiotics Affect the Pill?
Antibiotics alter the gut flora and affect the body’s ability to absorb hormones. More of the active ingredient is passed during a bowel movement and breakthrough bleeding and pregnancy can occur.
Examples of antibiotics that can affect the pill include amoxicillin, ampicillin, erythromycin and tetracycline. Other antibiotics that are also enzyme-inducers such as rifampicin and rifabutin are potent and will make the pill ineffective.
Enzymes in your body will not return to normal for several weeks after taking this type of medication so doctors will advise the use of a different method of contraception.
Enzymes are proteins that control your body’s chemical reactions and they can speed up the processing of the pills ingredients which means less of the active component will be in your blood. This is why pregnancy is likely if no other contraceptive method is used.
What Other Things Can Reduce the Pill’s Efficacy?
There are several other things that can stop the pill from working. These are:
- Taking anti-seizure medication such as phenytoin and carbamazepine
- Taking HIV medications like Norvir
- Taking a morning-after pill with ulipristal acetate in it
- Taking the herbal remedy St. Johns Wort, e.g., for depression. There have been several reports of pregnancies in women taking St. John’s Wort and it is thought to be an enzyme inducer.
- Suffering from diarrhea and/or vomiting
If you have taken an antibiotic for three weeks or less, an additional back up method of contraception is not required unless you also have diarrhea or vomiting.
If you have taken an enzyme-inducing antibiotic you will need an alternative, non-hormonal method for four to eight weeks after you have ceased treatment.
I’m aware of how evil WebMD’s coverage is. They refer to simply abstaining on the day they guess the woman is ovulating. That is NOT modern Natural Family Planning. And even still, the sponge and spermicide (alone) are both higher failure rates.
Don’t think that WebMD is run by zealots? In their article about hormone replacement therapy, they note that depression is a side-effect of estrogen. But make no mention of it at all in the context of estrogen-based birth control pills.
Sorta true, sorta false.
The correct methods include checking for leaks after every, uh, input, and holding the condom on by pinching the base of the uh, nozzle throughout. I submit that no-one follows those rules.
Maxine Wright-Walters 1 , MSc., and Conrad Volz 1,2,3 , Dr.PH, MPH, (1) University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Pittsburgh PA., USA, (2) University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institut e, Center for Environmental Oncology, Co-Director Exposure Assessment, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, (3) Scientific Director, Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, Pittsburgh, USA.
ABSTRACT:
Most pharmaceutical estrogens and xenoest rogens are introduced into the environment through municipal waste water treatment plant (WWTP) effluent sources. These effluents contain synthetic compounds; surfactants, flame retardants and halogenated hydrocarbons that can mimic estrogens; and are discharged directly into rivers and lakes. As rivers and lakes are used for water and food supply, and recreation, and wastewater effluent usage increases, the pres ence and concentration of xenoestrogens in surface water becomes a valid public health concern. Additionally, many USA cities have significant combined sewer overflows releasing untreated sewage directly into surface waters, thus increasing the amounts of xenoestrogens finding their way into drinking water supplies and commercial and subsistence fishing habitat.
In the United States, humans are exposed daily to both pharmaceutical and xenoestrogens which have been implicated in various human health outcomes, such as testicul ar dysgenesis syndrome including testicular cancer and breast cancer in women. Also, they can have adverse reproductive effects in aquatic wildlife through sex reve rsals, production of intersex indi viduals, alterations in mating, and prevention of gonadal maturation. Combinations of estrogenic compounds are present in municipal WWTP effluents but, the natural estrogens, 17 β -estradiol (E2) and estrone (E1), and the synthetic E2 derivate 17 α -ethinylestradiol (EE2) are most responsible for in vitro estrogenic activity. Each xenoestrogen exhibits its own wildlife or human hea lth risk, but synergistic effects could occur with xenoestrogen mixtures. Less than 1 ng/L EE2 can cause feminization of male fishes, 4 ng/L caused abnormal reproductive development (mal e fathead minnows). E2 has been detected at concentrations from 1 ng/L to 80 ng/L. Total estrogenicity (E2 equivalents) of 147 ng/L has been measured in WWTP effluent. Nonylphenol, a surfactant and brominated biphenyls, a flame retardant have been detected between 0.1-3.7 μ g/L and 0.3-4.6 mg/kg (on suspended particles) respectively.
Understanding the species and xenoestrogen concen trations in surface water is imperative for environmental public health tracking of associated disease states. Such research will determine the necessity for utilizing limited and competing public financ ial resources to invest in technology to remove xenoestrogens from surface waters a nd, in regulation of fish or wild life consumption from our rivers and lakes.
...To date, estrogenic effects on aquatic wildlife have not been conclusively linked to only one particular comp ound, but some chemicals are mainly responsible for higher estrogenicity indexes. Among them, the natura l estrogens estrone (E1) and E2, and the exogenous, EE2, the active ingredient in oral contraceptive p ills, possess the highest estrogenicity indexes. A
Hahaha...that’s why they call you SnakeDoc...:)
Even having a vasectomy or getting her tubes tied is not 100% bulletproof effective.
This I know for certain.
Yep.
Contracepting the environment – Birth-control poisoning of streams leave U.S. environmentalists mum
BOULDER, Colo. (National Catholic Register) – When EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a pristine mountain stream known as Boulder Creek two years ago, they were shocked. Randomly netting 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city’s sewer plant, they found that 101 were female, 12 were male and 10 were strange “intersex” fish with male and female features.
It’s “the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really scared me,” said then 59-year-old University of Colorado biologist John Woodling, speaking to the Denver Post in 2005.
They studied the fish and decided the main culprits were estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches, excreted in urine into the city’s sewage system and then into the creek.
Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor David Norris, and their EPA-study team were among the first scientists in the country to learn that a slurry of hormones, antibiotics, caffeine and steroids is coursing down the nation’s waterways, threatening fish and contaminating drinking water.
Since their findings, stories have been emerging everywhere. Scientists in western Washington found that synthetic estrogen – a common ingredient in oral contraceptives – drastically reduces the fertility of male rainbow trout.
Doug Myers, wetlands and habitat specialist for Washington State’s Puget Sound Action Team, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that in frogs, river otters and fish, scientists are “finding the presence of female hormones making the male species less male.”
This summer, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the American Pharmacists Association will begin a major public-awareness campaign regarding contamination that’s resulting from soaps and pharmaceuticals, including birth control.
What the Boulder scientists discovered, however, is that few people care.
Or, if they’re worried, they’re in denial.
“Nobody is getting passionately concerned about it,” Norris said. “It makes no sense to me at all that people aren’t more concerned.”
When the story of his finding hit Denver and Boulder newspapers, Norris anticipated an immediate response from environmentalists, who define the politics of Boulder and are known to picket in the streets demanding ends to questionable farming practices, global warming and pesticide treatments.
To the professor’s surprise, however, the hormone story was mostly ignored.
Two years later, environmental groups have failed to take up the cause of saving Boulder Creek and its fish from hormone pollution.
Dave Georgis, who directs the Colorado Genetic Engineering Action Network, took to the streets of Boulder on several occasions to hold signs demanding that Boulder County regulate genetically modified crops from existence.
When asked about the genetically modified fish and the contaminated drinking water, however, he said: “It just has so much competition out there for stuff to work on.”
He told the Boulder Weekly that nobody needed to consider curtailing use of artificial contraceptives out of concern for the creek.
“You can’t have a zero impact, and this is one of the many, many impacts we have on the environment in everyday life,” Georgis said. “Nobody is to blame for this, and I don’t have a solution.”
Norris, an environmentalist and birth-control advocate, said that until society achieves better sewage filtration and invents harmless contraceptives, “there’s always abstinence, and we know that it’s 100 percent effective.”
To preserve the self-giving nature of the sexual act, which must always be open to life, the Catechism teaches that it is wrong to use contraception. Couples may space their children for just reasons in ways using natural family planning, which involves observation of signs in the woman’s body.
Says the Catechism: “The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception)” (No. 2399).
But Catholics shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for environmentalists to advocate a boycott of contraceptives, said George Harden, a board member of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, based in Steubenville, Ohio.
“If you’re killing mosquitoes to save people from the West Nile virus, you can count on secular environmentalists to lay down in front of the vapor truck, claiming some potential side effect that might result from the spray,” Harden said. “But if birth control deforms fish – backed by the proof of an EPA study – and threatens the drinking supply, mum will be the word.”
Harden said the growing knowledge of estrogen-polluted water may expose the cultural double-standards that protect birth control from the scrutiny given to other chemicals and drugs.
“It’s going to start looking funny,” Harden said. “The radical environmentalist won’t eat a corn chip if the corn contacted a pesticide. But they view it a sacred right and obligation to consume synthetic chemicals that alter a woman’s natural biological functions, even if this practice threatens innocent aquatic life downstream.”
Despite growing and nationwide knowledge of birth-control pollution in rivers and streams, leading environmentalists remain unfazed – even in Boulder, where it’s been known about for years.
Curt Cunningham, water-quality-issues chairman for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Sierra Club International, worked tirelessly last year on a ballot measure that would force the City of Boulder to remove fluoride from drinking water, because some believe it has negative effects on health and the environment that outweigh its benefits. But Cunningham said he would never consider asking women to curtail use of birth-control pills and patches – despite what effect these synthetics have on rivers, streams and drinking water.
“I suspect people would not take kindly to that,” Cunningham said. “For many people it’s an economic necessity. It’s also a personal freedom issue.”
As nonviolence coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Betty Ball has taken to the streets with signs in protest of genetically modified crops. She lobbies Boulder’s city and county officials to stop spraying mosquitoes in their effort to fight the deadly West Nile virus – a disease that killed seven Boulder residents and caused permanent disabilities in others during the summer of 2004.
“Right now we’re worried about weed-control chemicals and pesticides,” said Ball, when asked whether her organization would address the hormone problem in Boulder Creek. “The water contamination is a problem, but we don’t have the time and resources to address it right now.”
Norris said hormones have been detected in municipal water supplies, but he said the jury’s out on the long-term effects the chemicals might have on humans and human sexuality.
Research by New Jersey health officials and Rutgers University scientists found traces of birth-control hormones and other prescription drugs and preservatives in municipal tap water throughout the state in 2003, and they don’t know the effects long-term exposure may have.
“The question is, ‘Is this something the body deals with at low levels, metabolizes and there’s no problem? Or is this something that accumulates in the body?’ We just don’t know,” said Brian Buckley, the Rutgers chemist who led the four-year drinking water study, reported the North Jersey News. “To be honest, we are just starting to deal with the question.”
Rebecca Goldburg, a New Jersey biologist working with Environmental Defense, told the North Jersey News: “I’m not sure I want even low levels of birth control pills in my daughter’s drinking water.”
Ball said she’s alarmed by the sex-altered fish in Boulder Creek, and worries about the ramifications for humans.
“Unfortunately, it is emerging as a major issue in creeks and waterways all over the earth, and we’re seeing more and more anomalies, not just with fish but with frogs and other aquatic life. I think it’s a precursor to what will happen to humans who drink contaminated water,” Ball said.
Ball said she’s shocked that citizens of Boulder haven’t organized and taken to the streets, as many Colorado environmentalists did upon learning that farmers and agri-businesses were genetically altering crops. She said the major source of contamination that’s mutating Boulder Creek fish – birth control – makes it a political hot potato.
To avoid genetically modified crops, Ball said, one needed only to buy organic, genetically modified organism-free products at health food stores. Asking residents to stop polluting water with hormones, however, “gets into the bedroom.”
“I’m not going there,” Ball said. “This involves people’s personal lives, child bearing issues, sex lives and personal choices. Maybe people are saying, ‘O my God, what do we do about this?’”
“Apathy is the fear of sticking your toe in, for fear it will change your life,” she said. “Sometimes positive change does require a change in lifestyle.”
Does she have breast cancer now? That’s the result of Birth Control pills.
Young Catholic Women Try To Give Church’s Position On Birth Control New Sheen
Essays for Lent: Natural Family Planning
Divorce Rate Comparisons Between Couples Using NFP & Artificial Birth Control
'Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer'
Natural and Unnatural (father of 5 shocks mother of 1)
NFP — It Ain’t Your Momma’s Rhythm
Responsible Parenthood in a Birth Control Culture, Part Two [Open]
Responsible Parenthood in a Birth Control Culture, Part One [Open]
Contraception v. Natural Family Planning — Part 5 of 6 [Open]
Journey to the Truth (Natural Family Planning) [Open]
Enslaving Women One Pill at a Time (Birth Control Pills and Natural Family Planning)
New Study Shows Natural Family Planning Technique More “Effective” Than Contraception
Fargo) Diocese set to require pre-marriage course in natural family planning
Making Babies: A Very Different Look at Natural Family Planning
Clerical Contraception (Important Read! By Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer)
(Fargo) Diocese set to require pre-marriage course in natural family planning
Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, July 25, 2004
IS NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING A 'HERESY'? (Trads, please take note)
Thanks Doc: More (and Younger) Doctors Support Natural Family Planning
Couple say Natural Family Planning strengthens marriage
Reflections: Natural family planning vs sexism
British Medical Journal: Natural Family Planning= Effective Birth Control Supported by Catholic Chrch
Natural Family Planning
>>Does she have breast cancer now? That’s the result of Birth Control pills.
Nope. 51 years old and cancer free.
Don't forget to factor in that the timing of ovulation and fertility with conception is likely only for a few days within a woman's monthly cycle - if at all (some months NO ripe egg is released). Though contracting AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases may be limited by using a condom, a woman can contract disease at ANY time she has sex with an infected partner whereas pregnancy may only be possible one or two days in the month.
YEP! My Mom said they used the “Rhythm Method” before all FIVE of her pregnancies!
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