When I was about 18, my then-girlfriend’s mother, an obstetrician, had a talk (in the same sense that the Conférence de la paix de Paris was “a talk”..) with my girlfriend and I about the Marquette method, and indeed cycle-based family-planning in general. That family were atheists, but I came from a Catholic family and had gone to a fairly hardcore Jesuit school (by 18 I didn’t consider myself a Catholic… but the Catholics still very much did...)
She told me, unequivocally, that she sees a shockingly high number of pregnant women who’d been faithfully (no pun intended..) following the method, and that based on her experience she strongly disbelieves any claims of how low the risk of conception is.
Now, I know that there’s a selection bias here since the only women who’d make it to her would be the pregnant ones; I know my relating this is essentially an “appeal to authority” since I’m not presenting any direct evidence to contest the “1%-5%” pregnancy risk claim; and I know that this particular obstetrician had a particularly good reason for not wanting me to attempt to use this method. I present the story, then, merely as evidence that there do exist front-line professionals who strongly disagree with the claimed level of risk, hoping to encourage people considering using this method consult a professional (by which I mean a doctor or family planning clinic or what-have-you, not an AI..) rather than naïvely following this guide.
This may be true; and my wife and I plan to report back in a year or two both if we didn’t get pregnant when we weren’t trying, and did when we started trying.
But I will say the 1-5% comes from the guttmacher institute, which has no incentive to push bad stats. If I was citing a catholic org, yeah I’d be very skeptical of their numbers, cause they have a religious reason to push their preferred methods, but guttmacher is a secular (and indeed pro-choice, so strongly opposed to catholic morals) org, and so they have no incentive to juice the numbers.
Of course, always ask a doctor, but I see no reason to doubt those stats.
I agree that the Guttmacher Institute (which I’d not heard of but have just looked-up) seems to be a reliable, scientifically-rigorous source.
I couldn’t agree with “no incentive to push bad stats/juice the numbers”: I think one of the lessons of the replication crisis is that almost everybody has an incentive to do this (or more accurately a bias towards doing this, not always consciously) - but A) I admit that I am saying this without actually going and looking at the stats/methodology, and B) I think your evidence (and argument) for its effectiveness is on the whole stronger than my evidence against it.
(But I still wouldn’t take the risk of using the method myself..)
When I was about 18, my then-girlfriend’s mother, an obstetrician, had a talk (in the same sense that the Conférence de la paix de Paris was “a talk”..) with my girlfriend and I about the Marquette method, and indeed cycle-based family-planning in general. That family were atheists, but I came from a Catholic family and had gone to a fairly hardcore Jesuit school (by 18 I didn’t consider myself a Catholic… but the Catholics still very much did...)
She told me, unequivocally, that she sees a shockingly high number of pregnant women who’d been faithfully (no pun intended..) following the method, and that based on her experience she strongly disbelieves any claims of how low the risk of conception is.
Now, I know that there’s a selection bias here since the only women who’d make it to her would be the pregnant ones; I know my relating this is essentially an “appeal to authority” since I’m not presenting any direct evidence to contest the “1%-5%” pregnancy risk claim; and I know that this particular obstetrician had a particularly good reason for not wanting me to attempt to use this method. I present the story, then, merely as evidence that there do exist front-line professionals who strongly disagree with the claimed level of risk, hoping to encourage people considering using this method consult a professional (by which I mean a doctor or family planning clinic or what-have-you, not an AI..) rather than naïvely following this guide.
This may be true; and my wife and I plan to report back in a year or two both if we didn’t get pregnant when we weren’t trying, and did when we started trying.
But I will say the 1-5% comes from the guttmacher institute, which has no incentive to push bad stats. If I was citing a catholic org, yeah I’d be very skeptical of their numbers, cause they have a religious reason to push their preferred methods, but guttmacher is a secular (and indeed pro-choice, so strongly opposed to catholic morals) org, and so they have no incentive to juice the numbers.
Of course, always ask a doctor, but I see no reason to doubt those stats.
I agree that the Guttmacher Institute (which I’d not heard of but have just looked-up) seems to be a reliable, scientifically-rigorous source.
I couldn’t agree with “no incentive to push bad stats/juice the numbers”: I think one of the lessons of the replication crisis is that almost everybody has an incentive to do this (or more accurately a bias towards doing this, not always consciously) - but A) I admit that I am saying this without actually going and looking at the stats/methodology, and B) I think your evidence (and argument) for its effectiveness is on the whole stronger than my evidence against it.
(But I still wouldn’t take the risk of using the method myself..)