British contraceptive service admits an uncomfortable truth
by Louise Kirk
An International Planned Parenthood ad.
When I was in Sydney last May, a headline in the free MX newspaper handed out in the underground caught my eye. “Contraception education failing the young”, it announced and went on to say that half of all pregnancies in Australia aren’t planned. Young women were sticking with “the most unreliable forms of contraception”.
What were these forms? “A national study by Queensland University and Newcastle University has found the contraceptive pill and condoms were the most common methods of contraceptive among women aged 18 to 23.”
“Oh,” I thought to myself. They aren’t telling us that in England.
But now they are. Or rather, the pro-life press in the UK has picked up a report from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service which tells the same story. What is interesting is its authorship, since BPAS is one of our main abortion providers. The release says that 66 percent of the 157,000 women who sought abortions at their clinics in the last three years came because their contraception either failed or was used incorrectly. Of these, 40 percent were on the contraceptive pill and 35 percent were using condoms.
BPAS tells us that contraceptive pills have a “perfect use” failure rate of one per cent when used exactly as instructed, “but with ‘typical use’ around nine in 100 women will become pregnant a year”. Likewise perfect condom use results in two pregnancies per 100 users while “with typical use – in which the condom is sometimes not put on or taken off properly – that increases to 12 in every 100”.
“Contraception fails and sometimes we fail to use it properly,” says Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS. “Ultimately women cannot control their fertility through contraception alone, and need accessible abortion services as a back-up for when their contraception lets them down.”
Loading ...
