What does it mean when the statistics say that condoms are, at best, 98% effective.
It sounds like 1/50 times a condom is used, it won’t prevent pregnancy. But this doesn’t seem right because those stats wouldn’t be worth the risk.
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Consider it kind of like birth control pills – if taken perfectly, they’re 99.9% (or whatever percent) effective at preventing pregnancy. However, that’s if you take the pill every day, at the same time every day, with no missed doses, or any other factors that may decrease the pill’s effectiveness (ex: antibiotics often reduce the pill’s effectiveness, and most pill manufacturers recommend you use a back up menthol of birth control while taking antibiotics.) how many people do you know who remember to take a pill every single day at the same time without fail, never missing a dose?
Same concept with condoms, used correctly yeah they’re effective. But a condom can be faulty, have a hole, be expired, it could break. Or the person using it could put it on incorrectly (inside out) all of which reduce effectiveness.
So fun story, when a condom breaks while inside, you get a “woah that feels good” feeling, you don’t get a “did the condom just break” thought. Only when you pull out do you realize you’re in the 2% club.
It means that if you use condoms correctly for a whole year, there’s a 2% chance of pregnancy happening over the course of that year.
All birth control statistics are per YEAR, not per time you have sex.
I wanted to warn everyone reading this that condoms are 98% effective only when used perfectly and they are actually 87% effective in real life.
It’s 2% chance per year of a couple using condoms as their only birth control, not 2% per usage.
The statistics are less clear on the exact reasons for that – if you ask people to self report whether they are using a condom properly, they tend to answer yes even if they aren’t. So the long term studies that measure failure rate aren’t generally able to address failure cause.
But the studies that do attempt to address that tend to result in misuse being a factor. These generally take the form of either asking someone to put on a condom in a lab setting and seeing how many screw it up or surveying about specific practices during sex that run afoul of proper condom use (ex: opening the packet with teeth, oil based lube, etc.).
More like 1 in 50 people
– Don’t know how to use our put on a condom
– Use dry or expired condoms
– Somehow damage their condoms
– Don’t put on a condom until they’re about to ejaculate
– Lie about using condoms
1 – manufacturing errors are possible
2 – a percentage of people much higher than 2% lie and/or use products in ways they were not intended
3 – numbers like this are built off of estimates that include thousands, if not millions, of test cases. 2% does not really mean 1 out of 50 in every sample size. It means that when they test 10 million of these things about 2% of them failed the quality assurance test likely for reasons stemming from points 1 or 2
So the contraceptive efficiency is measured with a thing called Pearl index. It’s basically asking a couple what method they use, and following up whether they get pregnant within a year. It’s a very very very flawed measurement methodology.
One obvious problem is that its totally self report based. And people lie. Maybe they are ashamed or just forget to mention that at this one time they didn’t put on the condom. Some people say “we use it as intended” but they in fact put it on after “a little bit going in without, just for the feeling”.
Another obvious problem is that people have different amount of sex. Getting pregnant is proportional to sex. The measurement says “one year follow up”, but how many times did you have sex in that year? 20? 100? 200? Maybe there’s an unknown relationship between methods and number of sex, let’s say condom users have an average of 150, calendar users have 50. If they have the same amount of children (made up number) in a year, condom is still 3x better.
Condom, if used properly, is a very safe contraceptive method, and the Pearl index is very misleading here.
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