Child-Free by Choice

I've been thinking about the despicable practice of women "oopsing" their partners by accidentally-on-purpose getting pregnant and wondering how common it is. I'd love it if someone did a study--like the Kinsey reports in the 1950s--that gave some statistics for this. I think it's much more common that most people realize.

I have heard that most pregnancies these days are "unplanned," and I can't help but wonder how many of those ARE in fact planned--planned by the mother but not by the father, or "oopsing." Don't you find it curious that CF women who are not sterilized go for years successfully using birth control without any "unplanned" pregnancies.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading romance novels. Historicals, contemporaries, you name it. One author I really like for the most part is Susan Elizabeth Phillips. She writes contemporary books with a lot of sharp dialogue, battle-of-the-sexes kind of stuff.

But. There is something that is really bothering me. I just started reading her books a few months ago, and I really liked them, so I've been reading more of them and I discovered that two of her books have female characters "oopsing" their partners.

In "Nobody's Baby But Mine" (I know, I know--I should have known from the title that I probably would hate this book!), Jane Darlington is a single physicist in her mid-30s whose biological clock is ticking. In a really far-fetched plan, she decides to seduce an NFL player because she assumes he won't be very smart, and she doesn't want her baby to be freakishly intelligent like she is. Stay with me, here. She actually has to seduce him twice because she doesn't get pregnant the first time, but she does after the second. He finds out what she's up to and is furious at being used. He forces her to marry him and since it's the off-season, he whisks her away to his hometown where after a few months, they end up falling in love. Deception forgiven. UGH.

In "Ain't She Sweet" (which I'm reading now), it's not the main character who does the oopsing. It's a secondary character, Winnie. She is terribly insecure in high school but after graduation, she becomes the rebound girlfriend of the most popular boy in town. She tells him she's on the Pill (she's not). She gets pregnant. They marry. When the novel opens, they've been married for 14 years and have a teenage daughter. They are having marital problems and one day in the middle of a fight, she tells him she got pregnant on purpose and lied to him. He says he's known all along she did it on purpose but that he doesn't care. I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm assuming all is forgiven in the end.

This really bugs me because she's a great writer otherwise, but I'm having a hard time with this behavior being written in such a way that the author wants you to sympathize with and feel sorry for these women.

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Obama: Whiner in Chief

 

>>>Don't you find it curious that CF women who are not sterilized go for years successfully using birth control without any "unplanned" pregnancies.<<<

Yes I have found that to be very curious! I know birth control effectiveness can be dependent on how familiar a couple is with one another...condoms in particular tend to be more effective with couples who are monogamous and been together for some time. I'm guessing it has to do with the couple having practice using the method properly and knowing each other and reactions well. But still...the effectiveness rates are high enough anyway, particularly with BC pills, that I'm skeptical when I hear that someone got pregnant when using them correctly.

I think part of it has to do with how much of a priority contraception is to a particular couple. With a CF couple, an unexpected pregnancy would be a crisis situation. For a couple that wanted children eventually, an unexpected pregnancy may be a surprise and perhaps not the best timing, but not viewed as a tragedy... it would be unexpected, but not necessarily unwanted, KWIM? So, it makes sense that couples who don't want to be pregnant put more effort into proper use of contraception than those who are just using BC for timing.

Also, it's truly shocking how unconsciously ignorant some people are about BC. I used to lurk on the BC board here on iVillage, and was surprised at how many people didn't realize you had to take a combination pill within 2 hours of your normal time. They thought taking the pill the morning after you forget constituted "close enough"! Or, they didn't realize some medications interact with the pill! I actually talked to a woman once who said she got pregnant after an evening with her DH where they had a bottle of wine and got frisky, then she fell asleep and didn't take her pill until the next morning, so "see, you can get pregnant even if you take the pill perfectly like I did." Ummmmm, no, you missed a pill and got pregnant.

I don't really consider honest sloppy or ignorant use an "oops". To me an oops is intentionally using BC incorrectly to get pregnant over a partner's wishes. I see a lot of sloppiness, maybe with the woman being more sloppy than the man would be if he could be the one on the pill. But, I don't see many true oopses.