Comments on: Literally Inconceivable: Contraceptives And Abortion Rates

By: A few graphs about teen pregnancy and sex | Alas, a Blog

A few graphs about teen pregnancy and sex | Alas, a Blog — Thu, 29 May 2014 15:57:28 +0000

[…] also highly recommend this post from Slate Star Codex on abortion and contraception […]

By: The Contraception/Abortion Connection: Part Two

The Contraception/Abortion Connection: Part Two — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:58:07 +0000

[…] Scott Alexander’s critique of my attempts to show a potential connection between contraception and abortion is very good. Several of the countries I cite to show abortion rates rising alongside contraceptive use don’t actually establish causation. Some countries do, however, and for these Alexander quotes Guttmacher’s explanation of why increased contraception is often associated with a simultaneous increase in abortion: […]

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By: Getting a Little More Detailed with the Contraception/Abortion Connection

Getting a Little More Detailed with the Contraception/Abortion Connection — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:57:43 +0000

[…] Alexander recently published a critique of a post of mine. He argues against the idea that there is a positive correlation between […]

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By: Cat

Cat — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:55:06 +0000

You have to pay for LARCs in the States right? Or they’re less affordable according to your health plan? Well yes, free contraceptives for everyone. LARCs advised first instead of the Pill, education in sex ed in schools on all contraceptives. I went to high school in the UK, where there was no kind of abstinence programme whatsoever, but they still only taught us about condoms. I wish someone had given me an overview of my options in my teens, it would have saved me alot of stress and panic over pregnancy scares. I educated myself about LARCs when I was 17 and got an implant.

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By: Cat

Cat — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:52:02 +0000

Indeed, Impanon/Nexplanon (the same contraceptive by the way, Nexplanon was developed to be easier to insert and decrease failure rates) are the ones presrcibed by the NHS in the UK. Norplant’s old school.

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By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:31:28 +0000

Thank you very much!

Hey, if you work at Guttmacher, can you answer a question for me?

I recently read this critique of you guys. I was able to find your paper on how Koch’s sampling procedure is worse than your own, and it makes sense, but I didn’t find a good rebuttal to the main claim that your methodology overestimated the number of abortions in the Mexican federal district by 10x, except one claim that there are probably illegal abortions still going on (but it seems hard for there to be 10x as many of them) and another saying Koch confused your Mexico City estimate with your all of Mexico estimate (which he did, once, but that estimate was off by 100x and even the correct Mexico City estimate seems to be off by 10x). Do you have a more complete response somewhere?

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By: Withheld

Withheld — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:49:38 +0000

Thank you for this fantastic analysis. It makes me so very glad that this exists.

I work in research at Guttmacher and just wanted to clarify a couple of things. First, as much as we’d love to take credit for the article you cite, Relationships Between Contraception and Abortion: A Review of the Evidence, it’s not actually Guttmacher work. It was published in our peer-reviewed journal (which is why you can access it on the site) but the study was conducted and written up by unaffiliated researchers.

Second, external sources in that article are cited diligently but are not linked because for the most part they are books or restricted-access journal articles. Aside from the fact that PDF linking hadn’t exactly reached its zenith by 2003, links to these sources either don’t exist or would be useless to lay readers. Mainly though, there aren’t external links because the empirical claims in the article are based on analyses conducted by the authors using data from the countries. The tables and figures in the article are the original sources.

Thank you so much for writing this, for thinking about this, and for using our website and journal exactly how they’re meant to be used! I really, really enjoyed this post.

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By: Sue Donym

Sue Donym — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:13:30 +0000

Source: The Real Problem with Male Condoms Is Nonuse. I actually doubt this study because the failure rate due to condoms slipping or breaking sounds too low relative to just not putting them on. Apparently people say they use condoms as primary birth control whether they actually bother to use them or not.

It’s not very fair to say condoms are ineffective and easy to forget – almost all of the former comes from the latter. Thinking over contraception options and deciding to use condoms every time is already strong evidence that you’re not going to forget them, so you can’t expect a 15% failure rate on top of that.

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By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 01:33:36 +0000

There are probably societies where 19 year olds having children would be great, but ours contingently isn’t one of them.

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By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 01:33:00 +0000

Thanks!

Paul, I’m good at the kind of epidemiology that involves asking Google what other people have figured out, and less good at the kind that involves doing my own research.

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