However, in your first paragraph, you’re arguing as if your presumption in the second were true. “It’s (cycles and fertility aside) a 3% chance every time you have sex” with a condom, which isn’t true. It’s, cycles and fertility aside and assuming perfect use, a 3% chance for every year you’re using condoms.

I really hope you mean “those condoms.” Especially over ten years.

So that’s why I wasn’t getting good results with my birth control :-).

Seriously, though, with AIDS the conservative argument about condom failure gets even more interesting, because you have a herd immunity situation – your odds of getting AIDS are based both on your own consistency in condom usage, and on the general infection rate in the population. So, let’s say, for the sake of argument, the chance of getting HIV from someone who is known to be HIV positive, per instance of condom-using sex, is the same as your chance of getting pregnant (which seems generous, since we’re evolved to welcome pregnancy and at least somewhat resist infection). In a population where everyone uses condoms consistently, your chance of getting AIDS has got to be much, much less than that 3% per year, because everyone’s condom usage is driving the background rate down. Meaning that, for condom promotion to backfire and increase the rate of HIV infection, you’d have to assume either that condom promotion increases the numbers of people having sex by multiple orders of magnitude, or else that people respond to condom promotion by going out and having more sex, but completely ignoring the message to use condoms.

On the other hand, with pregnancy you get no herd immunity effect, and, if you consider pregnancy a sufficiently intolerable outcome (both abortion and having the child are unacceptable to you), even a 3% failure rate per year may be too high – particularly if you’re having plenty of fun with outercourse and were never that interested in intercourse anyway (I have to assume more necking that Peter would approve of here, because I’m assuming someone acting on a basis of statistical risks only). So, I think seriously limiting when and with whom you have sexual intercourse based on the possibility of birth control failure can be a rational choice, even without Peter’s level of religious belief in chastity; where it falls apart is where someone starts advocating limiting the amount of education people get about condoms and suchlike, based on the chance that condoms may fail.

My point and/or line of thought was, and I know I made it badly (long, hectic day, no caffeine, contacts threatening to pop out of my eyes, etc), that while you have ten times the chance of being pregnant over ten years, you also have ten times the sex. Your chances of getting pregnant at any given time are still about 3%. So I suppose it’s Dawn’s (‘scuse me, Peter’s) way of putting it that is abominal. It’s (cycles and fertility aside) a 3% chance every time you have sex, and the laws of probability further support the likelihood of pregnancy the more times you roll the dice, so to speak, but she speaks of 30% as if it were the only important thing, disregarding the part where you get ten times as much sex.

I’d say, however, that it would be more accurate to calculate risk based on number of times someone has sex, rather than the time period over which they’re sexually active. A woman who has sex 100 times in 3 months, and a woman who has sex 100 times in 10 years, would have about the same chances of getting pregnant at some point during their respective time periods. A woman who has sex every night for ten years would have much greater chances at getting pregnant than one who only has sex 100 times during those ten years.

Your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom, consistently, over the course of those ten years . . .

I really hope you mean “those condoms.” Especially over ten years.

Dawn should have clicked thru the link but I don’t think its a closed and shut case that she was trying to mislead anyone. It seems more likely that Blogger for Choice’s lack of proper separation could have caused Dawn to believe that Blogger for Choice said what Twisty said.

Fair enough. But I alerted Dawn to the fact that the post was excerpted from Twisty’s blog, and wasn’t written by Jessica or NARAL. She removed Jessica’s name, but chose to otherwise keep her post the same, leading her readers to believe that it was NARAL spokespeople who wrote what Twisty did. Dawn now knows exactly what the situation is, and is choosing to intentionally mislead people.

And so that I don’t accidently do the same thing here, the last two block quotes in my post are both from Peter’s blog. Reading the comments now, I realize that the way I set up the intro made it look like the first was Dawn and the second was Peter; that isn’t the case. Sorry for any confusion.

It’s certainly obvious if you click on the link but Blogger for Choice does a rather poor job of separating what he or she says from Twisty’s blog post. He or she doesn’t use blockquotes, italics, quotation marks, or a colon to separate Twisty’s words from his or her words. I could easily see how someone who didn’t click on the link would think that the quote from someone else that twisty blockquoted was the only thing Twisty said.

Dawn should have clicked thru the link but I don’t think its a closed and shut case that she was trying to mislead anyone. It seems more likely that Blogger for Choice’s lack of proper separation could have caused Dawn to believe that Blogger for Choice said what Twisty said.

First year, 97 out of a hundred women have not gotten pregnant even once, using that condom. Assume, for the sake of argument, that pregnancy is a random, coin-flip type event, and that the 3% who got pregnant in the first year aren’t especially predisposed to getting pregnant while using a condom. Second year, 97% of the women who didn’t get pregnant the first year still don’t get pregnant, while 97% of the women who did get pregnant succeed in not getting pregnant a second time. So you multiply 97% by 97% to get the percentage of women never pregnant at all. After ten years, this is .97 x .97 (etc. 10x), which, when I use my handy calculator, comes out to 0.73742 (if I truncate at five digits). So a 74% chance of not getting pregnant, and a 26% chance of getting pregnant at least once – not the odds Dawn was giving, but actually somewhat close to her odds.

Of course, this assumes, a) that you’re constantly sexually active during those ten years, b) that you’re only using the condom, and not any additional method of birth control, c) that the 97% effectiveness estimate for the condom is correct, and d) that pregnancy while using a condom really is a random event. It might be that assumption d) is wrong, and that people who have experienced one condom failure are much more likely to experience a second. In that case, maybe rather more than 74 of your original hundred condom users got through the ten years without getting pregnant.

Now, if you didn’t use that condom, you had something like a 15% chance of getting through each year without getting pregnant, so, even though only 74% of the condom-users (assuming random distribution of failures) managed to avoid ever getting pregnant, everyone gained by using condoms. Most of the people with condom failures only got pregnant once, which is much better than they would have managed without condoms. So the moral of the story isn’t that condoms are worthless, it’s that you can’t take for granted, because you’re using condoms, that you’ll go through your whole reproductive life without an unplanned pregnancy. Which actually should make a difference to how you make your sexual choices; if, for example, you spent the full ten years sleeping with someone who fully agrees with you about birth control, but vehemently differs with you about what to do if birth control fails, there’s a 24% chance that at some point during those ten years you found yourselves deeply at odds.

Your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom, consistently, over the course of those ten years, will of course be much lower than your chance of pregnancy (well, unless you’re a gay man, in which case your chance of pregnancy is so darn low it can’t be beat, but your chance of getting AIDS while using that condom consistently is still pretty low).

Jill has a way of bringing out the liberal in me. :-)

The ultimate contradiction between what people like Dawn Eden want and what actually happens is this (I speak mainly from a NY perspective). Most people aren’t ready financially for a child until they’re in their late 20′s or early 30′s, at least (Personally, I’m shooting for the 20′s, but I’m prepared for a tight budget). But to a lot of religious pundits, women are supposed to get married in our early 20′s.

So, if nobody got married till they were ready for kids, then people in NY/NJ would get married OLLLD (past Vox Day’s expiration date of 26).

In a part of the country as expensive as this one, you’re not going to see 21-year-olds who are honestly ready for kids. So either the pundits get their married 21-year-olds, or they get their 28-year-olds who are ready for children, but at least in the northeast, it’s not likely to be both.

I speak, of course, as a Midwesterner-turned-New Jerseyan who tires of the folks back home telling her she’s an old maid and refusing to believe that no Virginia, we couldn’t afford kids at 25.

Being tired, I read this as, “I got pretty good sex in high school.” I was about to type “T.M.I.,” then read again. ;-)

My mother did not want my youngest brother. She already had five living children under the age of 7, including 2-year-old twins that she hadn’t expected to be twins (her first child died shortly after birth). After the twins, in 1970, she tried to get her tubes tied, but the times being what they were, the (public) hospital’s rules required her to either have 9 children already or to have permission from her mother, her husband AND her priest (guess who was the problem?). She was becoming quite aware that my father had an alcohol problem, and she was overwhelmed.

She wound up going through with the pregnancy, and fortunately, my brother was born post-Roe, and she was able to get her tubes tied after that.

But just because she wound up loving my brother after he was born (and, let’s face it: we were pretty solidly middle-class for many years after that, so at least when he was born, money wasn’t as big a factor as sanity) doesn’t erase the fact that she had no real options at the time she became pregnant, since she got pregnant pre-Roe and had been prevented from pursuing other options.