Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site noscvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!mtuxo!mtunh!mtung!mtunf!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!sdcrdcf!sdcsvax!noscvax!powers 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