Science Confirms The Obvious: The Pull-Out Method Is Not Great For Avoiding Pregnancy

Friday, August 16, 2013 - 08:30 in Psychology & Sociology

I Get The Joke But Read This Post Please via SnorgTees It's even worse for avoiding herpes. Today in scientific studies that confirm the obvious, we have a paper from the Duke University Medical Center that led to this stellar Reuters headline: "'Pull-out method' tied to unintended pregnancies." Well, um, yeah. Most current guides on contraception cite this Guttmacher study for its results on the pull-out method, also called coitus interruptus. That study was performed back in 2009, and found that with perfect use, the pull-out method had a failure rate of about four times out of 100. Not bad, really! But, of course, the whole problem with the pull-out method is that it's sort of hard to perform it perfectly every single time. By averaging that failure rate with the rate of pregnancy when it was used incorrectly all the time, the researchers landed on a failure rate of about 18...

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