re: Is birth control really only 99% effective or is that more a safety barrier from lawsuits?

I’m not well-versed enough to cite facts/figures and recite the tables, but no, “99%” is not just a legal protection. I’m pretty certain if you review the data from all the trials seen here, you’ll find that pregnancies occurred in some of the women in the cohorts. The first study had over 16,000 women. It can be a little hard to wrap your head around how percentages work and are applied in statistics at the population level. For example, if there’s a 1% chance of a bad thing happening in a clinic that sees that thing 100 times a day, that means it’s a daily occurrence (basically, once you average out over time. It may happen 3 times in one day and you may go a week between episodes, but you see it essentially everyday). So when it comes to pregnancies per 100, 99% is pretty good. But in 16,000 people who want 0 babies between them, it’s 160 babies, which is quite a few more than zero.


Anyway, they follow women over time and have done so for a while. They think there are several “fair” ways to look at data, including “who took it? “Who took it the right way?” And “how many women who are prescribed this wind up pregnant within a year? (Or a lot use 11/13 months, 18 and 24 months for whatever reason).”


So, the “perfect use” numbers are actually derived from observation data (some of which has some estimates added back or subtracted away, and you then get to decide how valid you think the entire study is. Thanks, “science”). They are not just estimates based on, “what sounds good but won’t get us sued?” And on this topic, you have a pretty decent amount of
1) interest
2) research
3) fairly easily agreed upon outcomes