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From: powers@noscvax.UUCP (William J. Powers)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: BULLPUKEY
Message-ID: <1006@noscvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Jul-85 12:57:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: noscvax.1006
Posted: Thu Jul 11 12:57:51 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Jul-85 20:31:19 EDT
References: <149@pyuxii.UUCP>
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 49

> One of you folk posted a rejiooinder to the 99.9% effective
> argument that a woman has a 1 in 6 posibility of becoming
> pregnant inside a year even if she is using contraceptives.
> Bull pucky.  Your argument is as flawed as a government
> contract.  You are assuming that a woman is fertile 100%
> of the time.  Wrong bucko.  Go back to square one and start
> over.  You would be closer if you said 1 in 6000.  Tell me
> when you reach the 6000 mark in a year friend and you will
> get the horny of the century award.  Especially since you
> perform only every other night.  Whew!  Anyone else catch
> this persons logic?  What a bunch of baloney.

I don't believe this logic is correct.  The 99.9% (or any such number)
is undoubtedly based upon the statistical occurrence of getting
pregnant while using a particular form of birth control.  This
occurrence does not include only the subset of those cases when women
were not fertile.  The statistics must take into account all times of the
cycle, because to do otherwise would be statistically nearly
impossible to do (for example, it would mean that a women would have
to know, and keep a record of, when she was fertile).
Obviously, all methods of birth control would be improved if a women
engaged in sex only when she were not fertile ( or, for that matter,
even if she tried to have sex only when she were not fertile).
It is still no clear, however, what set this probability includes.
The simplest statistic to take would be to find the occurence of
pregnancies of those women using a particular method of birth control.
This statistic is independent of the number of times that a women
engages in sex.  A subset of this set is to find the occurrence of
pregnancies for a given number of sexual encounters.  I will assume
that this is the subset which is reflected in the 99.9% figure.

So, if the probability of getting pregnant is 1/1000, then the
average number of pregnancies in N sexual encounters is N/1000.
In 1000 sexual encounters the average number of pregnancies is one.
If a women has sex 3 times a week, she will on average have an unwanted
pregnancy once every 6.4 years.  If we assume that a every women has
at least one child in her life, then one of those unwanted pregnancies
is wanted ( though possibly not planned, which is the assumption made
here).  This means that, if a women were to engage in this much sexual
activity for her entire sexual life, she would have at least one, or
more likely two, unwanted pregnancies in her life.  Without abortions
this would imply that the time for the doubling of the population of
America would be multiplied by 2/3 or, more likely, 1/2.  This is the
situation that existed before the advent of frequent abortions.
Before the widespread use of birth control, it was obviously much
shorter.  The rough conclusion is that without abortions America's
population would double some where around the year 2005.  Anyway, this
is all very crude without more data.
Bill Powers