10 Reasons Why Accidental, Undesired Pregnancies & Abortions Are Common More Than Once in a Lifetime

And Why the Blame-And-Shame Narratives Are Gender-Based Abuse

1. Comprehensive education about sex and relationships is withheld, keeping people dangerously ignorant in cultures that are saturated with unrealistic portrayals of sex in entertainment and advertising. At the same time, having babies is overly glamorized and romanticized, creating the false idea that pregnancy, birth and parenting are all so incredibly easy and rewarding.

2. Preventing pregnancies is a long-term, gender-based burden that people with a uterus must carry and manage for more than three decades of fertility. In the U.S., people with a uterus spend just 2.7 years pregnant, postpartum, or trying to become pregnant — while they spend 31 years trying to avoid becoming pregnant. 

3. All contraceptive products require a level of flawless use that is impossible to attain and sustain over a long lifetime of fertility. The blame unfairly falls entirely on pregnant people when unintended pregnancies occur. But in truth — all of the products have a rigid requirement of ‘perfect use’ that sets people up not only for emergency pregnancy situations, but also for the shame of not being ‘perfect’ enough. Here are just a few examples of how people are expected to be perfect for 30 years:

• take a birth control pill every single day without ever forgetting or missing a single one;

• grab a condom before any foreplay, when pre-cum can cause pregnancy;

• remove a sponge at the right time, no sooner than six hours;

• perfectly time their Depo provera shot and remember to wait 10 days to have sex unless the shot was administered during menstruation;

• always check to make sure the physician inserted the IUD properly;

• insert female condoms perfectly, never upside down, always in far enough.

AND — even if people somehow manage to be superhuman and use contraceptives perfectly — the products themselves can still fail, resulting in pregnancy emergencies for which pregnant people are blamed.

4. It bears repeating: All contraceptive methods — like all human beings — are imperfect. Every year in the United States, 2.8 million people have accidental pregnancies, and about 1.6 million of those people were using some form of contraception that did not work.

5. All methods of contraception have long-term failure rates that are higher than advertised. And every failure represents a human being suddenly thrust into an emergency, time-sensitive pregnancy situation.

We are not told that the risk of failure compounds and rises over time. With a diaphragm, for example, the advertised annual failure rate for typical use is 12 percent, but over 10 years a person can have a 72 percent chance of getting pregnant. 

6. Disruptive life events out of people’s control interfere with use of contraception. These include a death in the family, divorce, domestic violence, job loss, reproductive sabotage, illness — this list is infinite because life is always messy.

7. Contraception can have side effects that some people cannot physically or mentally tolerate. For this, and other valid reasons, some people choose not to use contraceptives and to instead use medication abortion to control their birth.

8. Many people cannot afford and/or access contraception. High cost and lack of insurance are obstacles to access. Also, many people in rural areas do not have easy access to physicians who can provide contraception. These barriers to access have the most devastating impacts on Black and Brown people and other marginalized groups already struggling with cruel societal injustices.

9. People with a uterus, just like people with a penis, are human beings with needs, longings and frailties. Human beings have sex throughout their lives for many reasons, including to share love, experience intimacy, and enjoy pleasure. Expecting girls, women, transgender men to ‘just use contraception or keep their legs closed’ for 30 years is unrealistic. Punishing people for accidental pregnancies by forcing them to remain pregnant and give birth against their will is a globally recognized form of gender-based torture.

10. Shaming messages and myths about the sexual lives of girls and women — and about every aspect of reproduction — through history have been created by men who never experience in their own bodies: periods, pregnancies, births, miscarriages, or abortions. They have no authentic authority to make the rules or messages about reproduction.

Contraception is great when it can be accessed and when it works. Also, all contraceptive packaging, marketing and counseling should include this statement:

Contraceptives can fail for a variety of reasons. When people have accidental pregnancies that they do not want to continue, abortions are wise, responsible, and healthy options as part of the full spectrum of common and normal reproductive experiences.

We have to unlearn lies and shame by seeking the facts and by respecting all reproductive experiences. We must reject language that stigmatizes pregnancies as problems to be fixed or mistakes to be shamed. Instead we must speak of all pregnancies as common human experiences to be managed with respect and compassion.

ART — blue graph at the top by Liz and Mollie.

Sources: 

Family Planning in the Era of Health Reform: Guttmacher Institute

https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/family-planning-and-health-reform.pdf

How Likely Is It That Birth Control Could Let You Down?: New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sunday-review/unplanned-pregnancies.html

U.N Human Rights Expert Condemns Broad Range of Reproductive Rights Violations as Torture: https://reproductiverights.org/press-room/un-human-rights-expert-condemns-broad-range-of-reproductive-rights-violations-as-torture