PSA: you have less control over whether you have kids, or how many you get, than people generally believe. There are biological problems you might not know you have, there are women who lie about contraception, there are hormonal pressures you won’t feel till you reach a certain age, there are twins and stillbirth, and most of all there are super horny split second decisions in the literal heat of the moment that your system 2 is too slow to stop.
I understand this doesn’t answer the question, I just took the opportunity to share a piece of information that I consider not well-understood enough. Please have a plan for the scenario where your reproductive strategy doesn’t work out.
There are biological problems you might not know you have, there are women who lie about contraception, there are hormonal pressures you won’t feel till you reach a certain age, there are twins and stillbirth, and most of all there are super horny split second decisions in the literal heat of the moment that your system 2 is too slow to stop.
This is absolutely nonsense IMO for any couple of grown ups of at least average intelligence who trust each other. People plan children all the time and are often successful; with a little knowledge and foresight I don’t think the risk of having unplanned children is very high.
Plenty of grown ups of average or even above average intelligence assume that 99.9% effective contraception means they’ll never be in the .01% statistic.
If you’ve had the “if the highly effective redundant contraception fails, should we abort?” conversation before getting any sperm anywhere near any eggs with every partner you’ve ever had, I’d posit that you’re in a slim minority of humanity.
And no human, no matter how rational, can predict with perfect accuracy what their emotional response will be to experiencing a physiological event that is completely novel to them.
I mean, .01% is a tiny rate if we’re talking yearly, and I think an acceptable risk even if you don’t plan to abort. But at this point we’re completely away from the original point because .01% would mean you have a lot of control, which is my point exactly. Nothing is perfect, but the estimated efficacy of good contraception is probably largely dragged down by a long tail of people who are really bad at it or downright lie in self reporting studies.
Strong disagree. Probably what you say applies to the case of a couple that cares sufficiently to use several birth control methods, and that has no obstruction to using some methods (e.g., bad reactions to birth-control pills).
Using only condoms, which from memory was the advice I got as a high-schooler in Western Europe twenty years ago, seems to have a 3% failure rate (per year, not per use of course!) even when used correctly (leaving space at the tip, using water-based lubricant). That is small but not negligible.
It would a good public service to have an in depth analysis of available evidence on contraception methods. Or maybe we should ask Scott Alexander to add a question on contraception failure to his annual survey?
You mentioned things like women who lie about contraception and split second decisions, which IMO are nonsense to bring up in this context. But going back to condoms: yes, I believe that 3% figure to be garbage. The 3% figure is average and based on people self-reporting. But in practice, condoms are hard to break, and even if they do break it’s easy to realise. Morning after pills are a thing for “accidents” you notice. So IMO reasonably conscientious people that actually use condoms properly (rather than just saying so in questionnaires) and double down with morning after pill in case of accidents will achieve a much better rate. 3% is an upper bound, because it includes a lot of confounders that skew the rate to be worse.
I didn’t say the risk was “very high” (which would indeed be nonsense), I said it is non-zero. And I personally know two men who were tricked into becomng fathers.
And the thing with average intelligence is that only 50% of the population has it. For both partners to have it has to be (slightly) less likely than that.
No risk is zero, that’s not a reasonable way to think about control over one’s life. And you don’t choose partners at random so intelligence send conscientiousness in couples probably correlate far better than that.
PSA: you have less control over whether you have kids, or how many you get, than people generally believe. There are biological problems you might not know you have, there are women who lie about contraception, there are hormonal pressures you won’t feel till you reach a certain age, there are twins and stillbirth, and most of all there are super horny split second decisions in the literal heat of the moment that your system 2 is too slow to stop.
I understand this doesn’t answer the question, I just took the opportunity to share a piece of information that I consider not well-understood enough. Please have a plan for the scenario where your reproductive strategy doesn’t work out.
This is absolutely nonsense IMO for any couple of grown ups of at least average intelligence who trust each other. People plan children all the time and are often successful; with a little knowledge and foresight I don’t think the risk of having unplanned children is very high.
Plenty of grown ups of average or even above average intelligence assume that 99.9% effective contraception means they’ll never be in the .01% statistic.
If you’ve had the “if the highly effective redundant contraception fails, should we abort?” conversation before getting any sperm anywhere near any eggs with every partner you’ve ever had, I’d posit that you’re in a slim minority of humanity.
And no human, no matter how rational, can predict with perfect accuracy what their emotional response will be to experiencing a physiological event that is completely novel to them.
I mean, .01% is a tiny rate if we’re talking yearly, and I think an acceptable risk even if you don’t plan to abort. But at this point we’re completely away from the original point because .01% would mean you have a lot of control, which is my point exactly. Nothing is perfect, but the estimated efficacy of good contraception is probably largely dragged down by a long tail of people who are really bad at it or downright lie in self reporting studies.
Strong disagree. Probably what you say applies to the case of a couple that cares sufficiently to use several birth control methods, and that has no obstruction to using some methods (e.g., bad reactions to birth-control pills).
Using only condoms, which from memory was the advice I got as a high-schooler in Western Europe twenty years ago, seems to have a 3% failure rate (per year, not per use of course!) even when used correctly (leaving space at the tip, using water-based lubricant). That is small but not negligible.
It would a good public service to have an in depth analysis of available evidence on contraception methods. Or maybe we should ask Scott Alexander to add a question on contraception failure to his annual survey?
You mentioned things like women who lie about contraception and split second decisions, which IMO are nonsense to bring up in this context. But going back to condoms: yes, I believe that 3% figure to be garbage. The 3% figure is average and based on people self-reporting. But in practice, condoms are hard to break, and even if they do break it’s easy to realise. Morning after pills are a thing for “accidents” you notice. So IMO reasonably conscientious people that actually use condoms properly (rather than just saying so in questionnaires) and double down with morning after pill in case of accidents will achieve a much better rate. 3% is an upper bound, because it includes a lot of confounders that skew the rate to be worse.
The number seems unbelievably high to me. I don’t have strong evidence to the contrary, but I also don’t trust self-reported correct use.
I didn’t say the risk was “very high” (which would indeed be nonsense), I said it is non-zero. And I personally know two men who were tricked into becomng fathers.
And the thing with average intelligence is that only 50% of the population has it. For both partners to have it has to be (slightly) less likely than that.
No risk is zero, that’s not a reasonable way to think about control over one’s life. And you don’t choose partners at random so intelligence send conscientiousness in couples probably correlate far better than that.