If you really need your pills maybe cut back on the Double Mochachinos for a week or pawn that cool Ipod on Ebay.

But honestly...

Being a Male if my partner said "Look I'm broke and can't buy my BC pills so we can't get to the snuggles tonight"...i'd be reaching for my wallet before she finished her sentence.

ah, okay. misread. theconservative is correct--it's not that a woman will will get pregnant 11 times for every 100 times she fucks a guy that's using a condom, it's that for every 100 sexually-active women per year whose partners use condoms, 11 of them will end up pregnant.

that's a really, really bad way to measure these things. i mean, jesus, that 11% figure means nothing. it bears no actual relation at all to the chance that a woman will get pregnant if her sperm not-donor uses a condom. you can't derive any useful data regarding the effectiveness of condoms from that figure.

Sort of. According to Robert Hatch, Contraceptive Technology Ardent Media 2005, as cited by Public Health of King County, it's "fairly effective."
Link

The typical rate of success is 75%, with success with "perfect use" 91-99% effective. According to EngendeHealth, perfect use requires correct interpretation of the mucus, along with use of temperature.

Contraceptive pills are rated "extremely effective," with typical success 92% and perfect use effectiveness of 99.7%.

i do really love how people can suggest there's no way a woman can prevent pregnancy without having someone else pay for her birth control.

Obviously, the statistics are valid, as they are compiled over a large number of samples, and show the difference between the natural failure rate of condoms (which is a fraction of a percent) and the failure rate in practice (where there are errors in such in empoyment). However, you shoudn't misinterpret them, because your misinterpretation grossly distorts the facts.

If condoms failed 11% of the time, almost 100% of women would be pregnant over the course of a year. The 11% though is a good proxy measurement that can help people decide just how effective condoms are if they will be having sex a lot over the course of a year. Of course, if you are just having the odd one night stand or two, condoms will be more than adequate (but using the pill can only help your chances to avoid pregnancy, and has ancillary health benefits)

oops again, it would be .1527%

Ah. OK. Gotcha.

The point, of course, is that the raw numbers (whether they are per fuck or per year) are quite meaningless. The simple fact is that using the pill is a statistically far, far better option. Especially considering that its unlikely one would get pregnant more than once in a year anyway.

Yeah, the gov't sucks, discrimination is every where...So?

Ladies, any guy worth letting into your pants should have no problem ponying up half the cost of the pills. If he won't, i'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but you shouldn't be fucking that guy anyway.

As for picking up random dicks...thems the brakes I guess.

oh, and morgan, please tell me where i suggested 'just telling the guy to use a condom."

I always got my pills free at Planned Parenthood...

I personally recommend the catholic special: pull and pray

Late to the party.

I'm certainly not against making birth control affordable. We (and I'm talking about numerous wealthy countries) have whole institutional and infrastructural arrangements to deal with actual children, so enabling people to choose when they have children seems to me part of that picture.

I kind of baulk at the whole "war on women" thing. It's a particular type of hyperbole with a particular agenda, imposing a way of looking at the world that is neither productive nor necessary for feminism. (If we were to take the "war on women" idea seriously, we'd be left with the awkward question of why birth control was ever subsidised in the first place.)

I mean, if I were being facetious, I'd point out that in fact, clearly BitchPhD's analysis does not go far enough. The fact that birth control has gone up in price is hardly the underlying issue. The underlying issue is that, back in the day, the ruling members of the evil Patriarchy Inc. decided that women would do the ovulating and carrying to term, and men would do the ... well, some manual labour, plus general enjoyment of Masculine Privilege.

That's where the War On Women started! That's what needs to be reversed! Let's get on that!

The point I think IS that statistically you can't show that unless you know how many times they are having sex in the year, because although one might only get pregnant once a year, they likely could fuck more than once a year.
"The numbers are meaningless" . . . " statistically far far better " ,what huh ?

It's an excellent measure of condom efectiveness in the real world, but like you said, you can't take it to mean things that it does not measure.

Do you mean there's reason to expect that there would be a statistically significant difference in the number of times a couple using condoms has sex, versus the number of times a couple using the pill has sex?

I think if we assume that couples using condoms have sex about as often as couples using the pill, we can conclude that condoms are (relatively) less reliable. And before someone tells me that to assume makes an ass out of them and me, I'd point out that to assume anything else carries the same risk unless we have good reason for believing that these different couples would have different frequencies of sex. And I'm not sure what reasons we'd have to believe that.

So there.