By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 2
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of the book The Case Against Condoms, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“Family planning” experts use several false comparisons to promote the use of condoms, some of which are widely accepted among the public. However, they all have a fatal flaw — they intentionally omit the safest choice.
The most popular such argument is the “parachutes and prophylactics” parallel. The condom pushers say that, if your child was in an aircraft that was going to crash, wouldn’t want him or her to have a parachute with them? Of course everyone answers “yes” to this question. So we are presented with two choices — remain in the airplane as it crashes into the ground and have a 100 percent chance of dying, or leave the airplane while it is in the air and have a 100 percent chance of living. Naturally, the only logical answer would be to use the parachute.
But what about the “missing choice”? If you know that the aircraft is going to crash, the safest option is to remain on the ground, which carries a zero percent chance of dying.
This “missing choice” allows family planners to say that condoms are very effective at preventing pregnancy and transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. They certainly are effective — but only compared to people who use no method of contraception at all.
This leads us to ask exactly how often the “parachute” fails.
As we have seen, the frequency of condom failure depends upon many factors, most of which fall under the category of user error. There have been many studies performed on the real-world failure rates of condoms, which take into consideration “real world” practices.
A compilation of 23 major studies on male condom failure rates published in medical journals involved a total of 57,393 condoms used during heterosexual intercourse. These studies, conducted over the time period 1988-2008, found that 4.00 percent of all of the condoms broke and 2.06 percent of them partly or completely slipped off, for a total failure rate of 6.06 percent.
In other words, condoms provide no protection whatsoever against pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases 1 time out of every 16 uses. A 6 percent failure rate means that a typical couple has 6 condom failures in a year and a 1 in 4 chance of having eight failures in a year. In fact, if we followed 1,000 typical condom users, only 2 will have no failures in a year.
Would anyone in their right mind buy a parachute from a shady character who said, “Hey, don’t worry, pal! With this parachute you’ll get to the ground safely 15 times out of 16”? If parachutes had the abysmal safety record of condoms, skydiving would have been banned long ago since the average lifespan of a person participating in the sport would be about two months.
According to the “family planner’s bible,” Contraceptive Technology, the condom’s user effectiveness rate at preventing pregnancy is 82 percent. This means that the probability of pregnancy for a woman whose sexual partner(s) always use condoms are 18 percent in one year, 45 percent in three years, and 63 percent in five years.
Keep in mind that these are the lowest rates that can generally be expected, since they assume 100 percent condom usage all the time.
According to Census Bureau sources, about 6.3 million American couples use condoms regularly for birth control. Eighteen percent of this number means that about 1,134,000 unwanted pregnancies occur every year due to condoms breaking — a number equivalent to more than 40 percent of the unintended pregnancies in the United States annually!
This experience is mirrored in many other developed nations such as England, where a major study of 4,666 women seeking abortions at a large abortion mill during the period 1989-1993 found that 1,609 (34.4 percent) experienced condom failure. The failure rate in developing nations is inevitably higher due to lax manufacturing practices and distribution and storage of condoms under conditions that increase the failure rate, among other factors.
What about STDs? The medical literature is replete with studies showing that it is far better to use condoms than not when fighting various sexually transmitted diseases. But once again, these studies universally omit the third option — abstinence — and in some cases actually denigrate it as “unrealistic.”
In reality, science and experience both prove that abstinence and faithfulness are the only effective means of combatting STDs.
Experience has shown us that condoms are even worse at preventing “social diseases” than they are at preventing pregnancy. After all, a woman can get pregnant only during the fertile part of her cycle, but she can get infected by an STD every day of the month. And, while there may be “emergency contraception” to prevent the continuation of a pregnancy (usually causing an early abortion), there is no such thing for a disease. Condoms — even if they do not fail — offer no protection at all against diseases such as human papilloma virus and herpes simplex virus, which frequently infect the entire genital area.
Health authorities agree that condoms (when used perfectly and when they do not break, leak, or slip) effectively block such venereal diseases as gonorrhea and syphilis. However, condom misuse or breakage can cause massive exposure to these diseases. This is an unnecessary game of Russian roulette, where the chance of losing is 1 in 16.
These facts account in large part for a resurgence in several STDs. Genital chlamydial infection is the most common bacterial STD in the United States, and is the leading cause of preventable infertility and ectopic pregnancies. One and a quarter million new cases of chlamydia (the most common venereal disease) are reported each year.
Genital warts are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common viral STD in the United States, accounting for three million new cases each year. HPV is present in an estimated 50 percent of all sexually active young women, and, as with other STDs, is associated with multiple sexual partners and with earlier intercourse.
There are about 300,000 new cases of gonorrhea in the United States each year, many of which are caused by strains resistant to treatment, and up to one-fourth of all infected men have no symptoms. Gonorrhea can also infect other mucous membranes, including the mouth. The disease can have extremely serious consequences if left untreated, including sterility, pelvic abscesses, and severe health problems for infants born to infected mothers.
Hepatitis B is a particularly dangerous problem in some developing countries. It can lead to chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, cancers, hepatic (liver) failure, and death. There is no cure for Hepatitis B, and up to 20 percent of the population in many developing countries show signs of infection.
Herpes genitalis is caused by the herpes simplex virus (HSV) and infects about 30 million people in the United States today, most of whom show no symptoms. Those who do show symptoms may have painful ulcers in the genital or mouth area.
Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) is a result of infection with other STDs and viruses/bacteria such as gonorrhea and E. coli. PID afflicts one million American women each year, 20 percent of whom require hospitalization. PID also inflames the Fallopian tubes and is a leading cause of ectopic pregnancy.
Syphilis, one of the deadliest STDs, recently reached its highest level in 40 years, with 45,000 people in the United States newly infected in 2009. Untreated syphilis can lead to rashes, lesions, paralysis, aneurisms, blindness, and even death.
God’s Plan
Health professionals often assert that there are “epidemics” of teen pregnancy, AIDS, alcoholism, drug use, and of course, violence against abortion mills. Most of these allegations are exaggerated and are not supported with proper statistical analysis.
But their declarations of an epidemic of STDs are certainly not exaggerated. With more than 100 million people infected with one or more of 20 STDs in the United States alone, it is unrealistic to expect that a paper-thin, nearly weightless sheath of polyurethane or latex will slow down the epidemic.
The only way to completely eradicate all STDs is to follow God’s plan for our sexual lives — abstinence before marriage and fidelity during marriage.
Of course, the sex educators and condom sellers tell us that this is not a “realistic” solution. They are wrong. Because abstinence/fidelity is the only solution that will work, it is also the only realistic solution. Perhaps if the health professionals struggle unsuccessfully for another decade or two trying to contain the STD epidemic with impractical means, they too will reach the same conclusion.
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