[not new, just underreported...]

“Contraceptive Failure in the First Two Years of Use: Differences Across Socioeconomic Subgroups,” Nalini Ranjit, Akinrinola Bankole, Jacqueline E. Darroch and Susheela Singh. Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 33, No. 1. January/February 2001, pp. 19-27.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3301901.pdf
 
“Contraceptive Failure Rates: New Estimates From the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth,” Haisahn Fu, Jacqueline E. Darroch, Taylor Haas, and Nalini Ranjit, Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 31, No. 2. March/April 1999, pp. 56-63.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3105699.pdf
 

On Townhall.com today [9July07], Jennifer Roback Morse, author of Smart Sex: Finding True Love in a Hook-Up World, deftly and succinctly demonstrates how futile federally funded comprehensive sex education is for its target audience.

The common number that is touted as evidence for the success of contraceptives is close to 90%.

Ms. Roback Morse looks deeper and discovers that this number is more representative among married women in their 30's and 40's.

Within this [married] group, only 3% of these women became pregnant while using the contraceptive pill.

What is perhaps the most intriguing about this research is that the numbers come from Planned Parenthood. The very organization that aggressively advocates the use of contraceptives admits that their methods are at best feeble for their target audience. The federal government should look at these numbers and then focus its efforts on the inevitable success of abstinence instead of the inevitable failure of contraceptives.
[FRC, 9July07]
 
Additional Resources
Get the Government Out of Sex Ed
 
Monday, July 9, 2007
 
If you need an operation and the doctor tells you that overall, seven-eighths of patients have a successful outcome, you might think that was a pretty good deal. But suppose the operation failed. While you’re in the recovery room, the doctor tells you, “Oh, by the way, for people like you, the operation only succeeds 30% of the time. But we’ll sell you the solution to the botched operation.” You’d be furious. You’d sue that doctor for malpractice if you didn’t punch him first.
 
Yet this is precisely the situation Congress supports by funding Planned Parenthood and its allies to provide “comprehensive sex education” in secondary schools.
 
This is no exaggeration. Look at contraceptive failure rates, using Planned Parenthood’s own data. Two studies, (listed below, with website addresses) use this definition of contraceptive failure: the percentage of women who experience a pregnancy at the end of one year of using a particular contraceptive method. Somewhere between 12% and 13% of all contracepting women experienced a pregnancy within a year. In other words, about seven-eighths of women use contraceptives successfully.

Two of the most commonly used and widely promoted methods are oral contraceptives and the male condom. Of all women using the Pill for one year, somewhere around 8% will experience a pregnancy.

Between 14% and 15% of women who use the condom will become pregnant within a year.
 
But these statistics, while technically correct, don’t tell the whole story, not by a long shot. These are the “overall” statistics that our hypothetical doctor used in our opening story. The “for people like you” statistics paint a very different picture. These studies break down the population into age groups, income levels, marital status and race.
 
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him