Feminists For Choice

There was a great post on Newsweek’s blog last week debunking 6 common birth control myths. According to the post, withdrawal is quickly becoming the birth control method de jure. Could be that folks aren’t getting the safe sex information they need, you know. Could be that the religious right has waged a very successful anti-condom and anti-birth control campaign – they have shelled out propaganda that says birth control can kill you and that condoms don’t work. So if you measure success in terms of how many people are using birth control and condoms, then their campaign has met its goal. But if you measure it in terms of how many people are getting knocked up, then it is an abysmal failure.

I digress, though. We were talking about debunking birth control myths. Newsweek author Kate Dailey goes line by line:

The effectiveness rate for pregnancy prevention using the withdrawal method is about 96 percent. Condoms, on the other hand, are about 98 percent. (That’s when both are used perfectly. Otherwise, the success rate for both withdrawal and condoms can drop as low as 76 and 79 percent, respectively). These stats aren’t new; several studies in the early 2000s established the efficacy of withdrawal. But according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, otherwise young, smart, sexually savvy Americans still think of it as a shameful and foolish way to prevent pregnancies.

So get to it, all you sexually savvy blog readers. Click on over to the Newsweek article for the rest of the facts and fiction. And if you’re scratching your head trying to figure out which birth control method is right for you, click on over to Planned Parenthood..