Comment on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 06:16:58 GMT

Okay, but:

“A 2011 study reported that 49% of pregnancies in the United States were unintended in 2006, a slight increase from 48% in 2001.”

Reference: U.S. Center for Disease Control: Unintended Pregnancy Prevention.

About half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion:

“The 80 million unintended pregnancies that occur worldwide each year (38% of all pregnancies) can justifiably be deemed an “epidemic.” These pregnancies result in 42 million induced abortions and 34 million unintended births — births that contribute substantially to the annual world population growth of 78 million.”

Reference: Assn. of Reproductive Health Professionals: The Potential of Long-acting Reversible Contraception to Decrease Unintended Pregnancy.

For a person who believes abortion is murder, that looks like an epidemic of evil. For a person who believes in abortion rights, that looks like a huge need for abortion. If the amount of pregnancies where people were thinking about having abortions was very small and people usually had some sort of justification for them other than that they had caused a pregnancy before being ready for kids, I think the focus would shift to something common like child abuse.

Then again, it's possible that the commonness of a particular problem isn't a big factor in some of those people's decisions to pursue abortion as an important cause. If it is, I think the drastic reduction in abortions that would happen if we made unintended pregnancy history would probably result in those people focusing on something else.

Drastically reducing unintended pregnancy might actually be pretty easy. This is because a leading reason for unintended pregnancy may be that a lot of people do not understand contraceptive efficacy statistics. For instance, condom efficacy studies are done in one year periods, which means they're totally useless to help us determine whether they're enough protection for the duration that we want protection for (like 20 or 30 years before the females become infertile). For all we know, the failure rate adds up over the years. For a 2% failure rate, that would mean something like 50% over one's lifetime. (What statistic does that sound like?)

I tried and tried to find a condom study longer than one year and could not. I did encounter this other study on the aftermath of condoms as a sole method of contraception:

“Three hundred four women (78%) had used condoms for an aggregate total of 1178 years (average=3.9 years per woman; range=1 month-25 years). Seventy-eight women (25.6%) reported becoming pregnant while using condoms”

Reference: Journal of Family Practice: Lifetime Patterns of Contraception and Their Relationship to Unintended Pregnancies

Drastically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies might be as simple as getting people to understand these statistics and encouraging them to use enough of the right methods in combination that they actually get the low failure rate they want.

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