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

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

1. There is a severe shortage of quality education about sex and relationships. The taboos about sexuality keep people dangerously ignorant in cultures that are saturated with unrealistic portrayals of sex in porn, entertainment and advertising. At the same time, having babies is overly glamorized, creating the false idea that pregnancy, birth and parenting are all always easy and rewarding.

2. Avoiding pregnancies is a mental, emotional and physical chore that lasts for an entire lifetime of fertility — that’s about 30 years. Most people spend a total of just three years of their lives when they want to be and try to get pregnant and are actually pregnant. The rest of their decades of fertility are spent trying to prevent pregnancies.

3. All contraceptive products require a level of flawless use that is impossible to attain and sustain over a long lifetime of fertility. They all 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.

Also, the success of contraceptives also depends on how people store them and for how long. Contraceptives are affected by shelf-life and they also are sensitive to temperature. Birth control pills expire in 12 months; spermicide expires in about two years; Plan B expires in four years; Ella expires after three years. If kept in a place that is too cold or too hot, effectiveness decreases.

4. All contraceptive methods — like all human beings — are imperfect. Even if people could be perfect — the products themselves fail anyway for millions of people who use them. The failures cause pregnancy emergencies and bring on unjustified societal blame and shame. 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 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. Expecting people who can get pregnant to ‘just use contraception or keep your legs closed’ for 30 years of fertility is unrealistic. 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. 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 harmful myths have been created throughout history by men with their own agendas of power and control. They have shamed girls and women about every aspect of their reproductive lives. They have no authority because they do not experience in their own bodies what it is like to have periods, pregnancies, births, miscarriages, or abortions.

In summary, contraceptives are not a cure-all for undesired pregnancies. 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 reject ideas and language that stigmatize pregnancies as problems to be fixed or mistakes to be shamed. All pregnancy situations are 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