The funniest thing about people who aggressively promote the pull-out and/or rhythm methods of contraception because it worked for them their whole life is their utter lack of realization that it only works for them because they are low-fertility. There’s nothing moral or immoral about being low-fertility and it makes no sense to invest it with any emotional or philosophical significance. But I know a whole bunch of kids born through this method, and they are all amazing kids, so it’s just as well. (I don’t mean my kids. Mine were both planned.)
13 responses to “Contraception”
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Reply to “Contraception”
Yet another reason that I have a hard time believing you are now a conservative Republican. As I understand it, Republicans are fanatically opposed to contraception. The exception is condoms, but only for married couples.LikeLike
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Well, maybe those were the Republicans back in 1952. 🙂 Things have changed since then. We are now living in the world where Democrats fanatically believe in conversion therapy for gays and forcing women to put up with male flashers. Who could have predicted this?
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Well, maybe those were the Republicans back in 1952.
No, in 1952 Republicans were pretty reasonable people, although I was only 8 years old, so my memory may be faulty. Today, apparently, Ted Cruz is the prototype Republican. He is dangerous. I wonder how many bridges must collapse before Republicans realize they should have spent more money on basic infrastructure, and raised taxes to cover the cost. Maybe when a nice dinner for four at a New York City restaurant costs a million dollars, they will decide to quit borrowing to fund the government, and raise taxes. But I doubt it.
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The people who are die-hard proponents of this method are generally the religious types. If the method fails and they get pregnant, they don’t think of it as a failure but that they’ve received a gift from God. So from their standpoint, the method never fails.
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Also, health nuts are into it. Hippie types, environmentalists. They have this theory that hormones in urine get into the water supply and poison the fishies.
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I have misgivings about hormonal birth control, but I’d have even stronger misgivings about using an ineffective birth control method.
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Hormonal birth control is shit. It raises blood pressure, depresses libido, slaughters the endocrine system. But what’s the alternative, you know? Women who accept that every sex act will result in a baby are very few. And great for them but what are the rest of us supposed to do?
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Are there many people who are actively promoting withdrawal or the rhythm method these days? I must be running in blessedly less maniac circles.
However, if you mean NFP or FAM (distinction: the former doesn’t use contraception as a back-up, the latter does), which many people today do promote, you’ve got your terms mixed up. Each of the four methods are markedly different from one another.
Your thesis as applied to each of the four:
-Effectiveness of withdrawal almost certainly does correlate with lower fertility. Or, at the very least, ineffectiveness is dependent on comparatively higher fertility, due to the mechanism of fertilization involved.
-Rhythm’s effectiveness could be due to lower fertility, but more likely is correlated with regular cycles of a particular pattern (which, ironically, is often a higher-fertility pattern, but not always). It’s a calendar-based system, so ultimately it’s a question of whether your body and the calendar sync up, independent of the question of how fertile you are the rest of the month.
-NFP is fertility-neutral, since it involves only having intercourse during the infertile time of the cycle, which is determined by looking at some specific biological signs of fertility (not the calendar). Effectiveness depends not on fertility but on how easy it is to establish the fertile and infertile periods — which, in many cases, relatively more fertile women often have an easier time figuring out, because the markers of ovulation are so obvious, and relatively less-fertile women tend to have more difficulty determining because fertility markers are more confusing. (But this is not in every case).
-FAM depends on all the factors that influence NFP effectiveness, but also whether the couple choose to have intercourse when they know they are fertile, and if so, how effective the chosen contraceptive is.
So that’s the science. Meanwhile, my sympathy if you’ve been subjected to the people who spontaneously decide to discuss their reproductive life with you. That always mystified me, when I had young children: Why on earth do total strangers decide to spontaneously tell me about their personal medical history? And invariably try to justify it to me, who has said nothing at all whatsoever on the topic? Totally baffling. I’ve never felt the need to defend the quantity or quality of my offspring, nor felt anyone else needs to do so either.
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Oh, my favorite was when I was pregnant and every woman I met felt the pressing need immediately to share in graphic detail a terrible story of how she gave birth. It felt downright sadistic.
Of course, I’m sure there were many women who had a good birthing experience but those women never felt the need to accost me in a public toilet to detail how it went.
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// Hormonal birth control is shit. It raises blood pressure, depresses libido, slaughters the endocrine system. But what’s the alternative, you know?
Condoms. Or, if one wishes not to think before each time, then not-hormonal спираль / an intrauterine device (IUD).
I know a woman who used the pill for many years and it badly affected her uterus, likely causing her inability to carry a child to term now.
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Condoms are fine for a casual encounter but in a long-term relationship they are unsustainable. I can’t imagine anybody using condoms with her husband.
Do people do that? Does anybody know people who do that?
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I do. 13 years and counting. Because of medical reasons, copper IUDs are out, and I had some really shitty reactions to hormonal birth control.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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