Actual Pregnancy Risks

Although we want young people to practice safer sex and avoid unplanned pregnancies it’s not good practice to say, or to suggest, that it’s very easy to get pregnant. Authors of this study suggest that the likelihood of pregnancy from one single act of intercourse ranges between 0% and 9% with an average of 3.1%

That’s a lot lower than a lot of young people think and it may be a lot lower than you thought too? But what is the problem of hyping up the risks of pregnancy? What seems to happen is that people have unprotected sex a few times, don’t get pregnant, believe they are infertile, and so continue having unprotected sex.

Unintended outcomes

As the authors of this study conclude “A substantial proportion of young adults believe they are infertile. Improved provider counseling and sex education may be useful in helping them to better understand their actual probability of infertility, and this knowledge may lead to improved contraceptive use.”

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

So the more we hype pregnancy risks there is a paradoxical risk we discourage people from using contraception. However, hyping pregnancy risks also has other consequences too.

It causes a lot of stress

The most frequently asked question I get at BISH is from young people who are worried that they are pregnant – even though the sex they had could not really have started a pregnancy (eg dry humping or masturbation).

They think that there is a risk of pregnancy because some studies found that there were sperm in pre-ejaculatory fluid. This is something that we often talk about in sex education as a way of discouraging practising the withdrawal method or from using condoms incorrectly. This is also an effect from sex negative or abstinence models of sex education which says to young people that all sex is bad and that there are risks to all of it.

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The truth about pre-cum

However, in this study it was found that only some people had sperm in their pre-ejaculatory fluid and even then it was pretty low.

“Although our pre-ejaculatory samples often contained sperm with equivalent concentration and motility to what would be regarded as fertile in ejaculatory samples, the actual number of sperm in the pre-ejaculates was very low. We are unable to say how this finding might translate into the chances of pregnancy if these samples of pre-ejaculate were deposited in the vagina except that the chances would not be zero. All but one of our pre-ejaculatory samples contained fewer than 23 million sperm, and values as low as this were seen in ejaculatory samples of less than 2.5% of men whose partners conceived in less than 1 year.”

It’s clear from this that there is a risk of pregnancy from penis in vagina sex without ‘full’ ejaculation but that it is much much lower. The risk of pregnancy from non penis in vagina sex from pre-cum is practically zero.

Why we should get pregnancy risks right in RSE

Why is it important to get this right? Well, for one, it’s important to be factual when we are teaching about RSE. I also don’t think it’s very ethical or effective to use fear appeals of pregnancy to prevent young people from having sex. The other reason it’s bad is because it affects young people’s mental health. In these many messages I get from young people they tell me that they can’t sleep, they can’t stop thinking about it, and in some cases they have had suicidal thoughts.

So let’s try to get this right when we’re teaching about contraception. It’s a good idea to use condoms and contraception if we don’t want to get or get someone pregnant. The risks for one time sex are low, but if we have regular penis in vagina sex over time then our overall risk of a pregnancy will be high.

Here are a couple of links from BISH where I write about this

Am I Pregnant?

Fertility Explained

‘Pre-Cum’

If you want a fun card game to teach about contraception buy my Safer Sex Aces game

For a really great safer sex lesson check out DO… RSE for Schools

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However, even when are giving young people tools to navigate what works for them, we also need to ensure that we aren’t just presenting a level playing field. Oppression is going to make it harder for some people to make their choices around sex and relationships than others. The messages that many of us receive about different (and intersecting) parts of our identity can really do a number on us.

EG:

• disabled people being brought up to believe that they can never ‘have sex’ or be seen as sexual
• women who are told that they they shouldn’t ask for what they want from sex lest they be called a s**t (but that they definitely need to be interested in sex)
• people of colour (or BAME folk) experiencing racism and being told from a young age they are lesser, or pose a threat to white people and whiteness generally. Also how some people of colour are hypersexualised and others not
• lesbian, gay and bisexual folk being told that they have to come out at some point and so are not the default ‘normal’ sexuality
• trans folk’s experiences of often violent transphobia in the media and in the street making them feel that they don’t have a right to exist
• poor people, feeling that there can be so much more at stake in a romantic relationship for them than someone who has more money
• asexual folk hearing the messages that romance and sex are interlinked, and so could never really ‘love’ someone

So we need to make sure that RSE reflects this. We do this throughout the DO… resources by talking about how sometimes society gives some folk status and other folk stigma. Lesson one has an activity about how people’s experience of discrimination might make it much more difficult for them to feel okay about themselves. It’s covered in lesson two, where students can learn about an intersectional approach to gender. Lesson four includes how these different statuses and stigmas can make negotiating sex harder and easier for some people. The final lesson has real life scenarios which bring a lot of this out for students too.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

The other thing to do here is to make sure that we are advocating for the rights of everyone. By eradicating racism, religious intolerance, sexism, homo/bi/transphobia, ablism, classism then we would be going some way to even up the playing field and to make it easier for people to have the kinds of sex and relationships that feel okay for them. When people/the media whip up ‘debates’ about the rights of and existence of LGBT folk and other protected groups then we are actively making so many people’s lives harder. So good RSE needs this kind of advocacy too.

Article continues after this ad for my resources (why not buy some?!) They’re also available at the BISH Patreon Shop.

As well as DO… (and the resources here at Bish Training) I’d also strongly recommend checking out the primary and secondary resources at Agenda.Wales

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