PREVENTION AND HEALTH: ABOUT UNWANTED PREGNANCY
It is estimated that 200,000 of the 600,000 pregnancies that occur in the UK each year are “unwanted”, although it should be said that many of those who become pregnant in this way come to terms with the pregnancy and so the baby becomes at least to some extent ‘wanted’.
Most people imagine that all such babies result from ‘bad luck’ or contraceptive failure but those who work in the field of psychosexual medicine are convinced that most of the pregnancies in the so-called ‘bad luck’ women can be explained on more convincing grounds.
Human females over the age of the menarche (once they start having periods) can only get pregnant if they have intercourse within a few days of ovulation. Ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary) occurs 14 days before the onset of a period irrespective of the length of the woman’s menstrual cycle. In a ‘typical’ cycle this means that the woman ovulates on day 15. To be safe from unwanted pregnancies, therefore, she will have to abstain from penis-in-vagina intercourse or use a contraceptive for a few days around this time. As no woman has a completely predictable cycle, however, preventing unwanted pregnancy generally means using some method of contraceptives throughout the menstrual cycle.
There are many different forms of contraception, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages, but all are unsatisfactory in one way or another. It is these unsatisfactory aspects that lead to at least some unwanted pregnancies. Truly satisfactory and acceptable methods would leave less room for poor usage and other practices that lead to ‘failures’.
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