apparently only about 45% of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned
straight up, i thought it would be like 85%
the normally-pedantic part of me says “how would anyone know that though? Any study would only be able to count pregnancies that 1. got far enough to be noticed, and 2. either ended up being kept or aborted in a way that could be put on record. Large numbers of unplanned pregnancies are lost in either stress-induced miscarriage or secret abortion without anyone being told. Plus they’ve got to be relying on the word of the parents for whether the pregnancy was planned or not, and parents often lie about that. How is anyone even slightly confident in that number?”
While the abnormally pedantic part of me is saying, “you didn’t specify human pregnancies worldwide. so I’m certain the number of unplanned is actually in the 90-percents.”
i thought about doing the animal bit when i posted this, but ultimately decided against it.
anyway, the cdc publishes pretty readable literature about these kinds of things: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_02/sr02-201.pdf – noting that they are accounting for failed and aborted pregnancies.
now, i’m no stranger to being skeptical of anecdata (surveys) and estimates, both of which were used. that is the foundation of my disbelief in clinical psychology and psychiatry. but i also don’t understand why new parents would lie about it on a random survey? i don’t think there’s any stigma around fucking without intending to have a kid.
I mean, I have seen at least some stigma toward people who have unplanned pregnancies. But not because they were fucking around without intent to have kids… (though that is a common thing for the religious-right, traditional-marriage folks to stigmatize… but they’re not who I usually interact with, at least not when they’re fully speaking their minds.)
the stigma I’ve seen, is among people who openly support birth control and abortion, in theory, but are still judgmental jerks on a personal level, and will quietly express disdain for people with unplanned pregnancies behind their backs.
(because they’re assumed to have been careless and stupid. The idea is that birth control has a very high rate of effectiveness, so the assumption is that if you’re being careful, you will either not get pregnant in the first place, or you’ll abort before anyone finds out about it.)
(a wrong and arrogant assumption to make. But I do see it. Then again… I also see similar criticism of planned pregnancies if the parents aren’t considered to be in a good position to raise a kid, financially or otherwise. People can be judgmental about each other’s lives in general.)
However. You’re right, if the whole thing was an anonymous survey, there wouldn’t be that much reason to lie.
I mean, people do sometimes lie on anonymous surveys (I know better than to give fully candid answers on my workplace engagement surveys, no matter how anonymous they tell me it is, because I simply do not believe them about that). But if there’s little reason to believe the survey would use your answers to harm you in any way, then there’s little reason to lie. Rates of honesty are probably high on it, if the anonymity looks trustworthy.
And an anonymous survey could, potentially, also catch some of the data that would never show up in analysis of medical records.
Like, “how many pregnancies ended before there was ever any medical record of them?” Parents might volunteer that information if asked in a survey. (At least, about the pregnancies that made it far enough for them to notice.)
There’s still the problem of people lying to themselves, or muddying the borders of definitions (like, “do I call it an unplanned pregnancy if I wasn’t actually trying to conceive, but I also wasn’t trying to prevent it, and was prepared to accept it if it happened?”) (A surprisingly common approach, and also one I find mind-bogglingly terrifying… but hey, takes all kinds.)
Anyway. I suppose it could still give a fairly good ballpark estimate.