Unprotected Sex: Beware of Big Numbers

Margaret Sanger

Nurse, advocate for Female Contraception

Anthony Comstock

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

The good news is there is a new medication which can be used to prevent pregnancy--another morning after pill, but this one is more effective than Plan B and if you are the dithering type, you have a few more days to get to the drug store.


The bad news is the FDA hasn't made up its mind to approve it and is seeking expert opinion--Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson haven't called back.


If the FDA does approve it, it may require a prescription for it, which would of course mean you need a note from that daddy/mommy figure, the doctor, to say it's okay not to be pregnant.

As is true of so much of American discourse in the twenty-first century, we cannot simply think about this topic. We have to engage the services of experts. And those experts need things called numbers to really sound like experts, because: 1/ Nobody can argue with numbers, (because most people really do not understand numbers and get that deer in the headlights look whenever you throw some numbers in their direction.) 2/ You cannot sound like you know what you are talking about unless you have some numbers to wave around.

So the New York Times quotes an expert by the name of James Tressell, who not only has a number, but he's from Princeton. Princeton is where they've got Einstein's brain, in case you were wondering.

So this professor from Princeton is quoted by the New York Times (we have to assume, quoted accurately, because it is after all, the New York Times, where they have Scotty Reston's brain in a jar somewhere, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had Walter Lippman's brain,( although the Washington Post may have that. I'm not sure.) But some day they may have Gail Collins' brain in a jar at the Times and then you really will be able to believe every thing they have got printed there, 

But I digress.

So Mr. Tressell says, and I quote, or at least I paraphrase, that every night in this country of 300 million souls, one million, that is 1,000,000,  women have sexual intercourse without protection. No birth control pills, no diaphragm, no condom, no IUD, no Depot Provera, no nothing. Bare back.

Mr. Tressell does not say how many of those one million women intend to get pregnant and how many just aren't thinking too clearly.

The professor did not say how many of those one million women are menopausal, how many have no uterus, how many may have had their tubes tied, but I am going to assume, for the sake of discussion, he was talking about ONE MILLION WOMEN having sex, who could get pregnant.

And, he says, or maybe it is the Times saying, that the chances of a woman getting pregnant under these free form sexual experience conditions is about one in twenty. I'm guessing this includes all comers, if you will excuse the pun, by which I mean, 1 in 20 across all the days of the ovulatory cycle.

Whew!

No wonder the Taliban hates us.

Now, what is really staggering about all this is this question: How does Mr. Tressell know this?

The corollary question is: Wouldn't you like his job?

I mean, how would you go about figuring out how many women are having sex each night of the year across the fruited plains, in the mountains, from sea to oily sea?

I can only imagine.

Let me count the ways.

I guess you could start backwards, from how many pregnancies result in delivered babies, that is from the birth rates, but then you'd underestimate because there are a certain number who have abortions, take Plan B, lose their pregnancies naturally (and most women who lose one early don't even realize their were pregnant). So just counting live births would likely underestimate the number of intercourse events every night by a factor of who knows what?

Or maybe you could ask women in surveys, but don't women (and men) lie about sex all the time? I mean if you ask men how  often they have sex  you are going to get the typical macho twice a night with three different women, whereas the women may  not be willing to admit to sex at all or may be inclined to  under report. Who knows?

So, no, none of these methods would be likely to give even a halfway close real number.

So maybe...maybe the Center for Population Research has cameras.

Or seismometers.

Or who knows what?

It boggles the mind.

Personally, I have tried to count to a million once or twice, but I lost track of where I was, or got distracted, or fell asleep. So how does Mr. Tressell do it?

I don't know. But, we are talking about Princeton, the New York Times.

Got to be true. Most def. True that. Indeed.