The American Prospect wins an award for best article title of the week with “Exit Strategy“– a piece that is about neither Iraq nor Afghanistan but rather the withdrawal method of birth control.  Specifically, the fact that a recent study found that the often discredited method is nearly as effective as condoms in pregnancy prevention.

Now a new paper (PDF), published by the journal Contraception, culls evidence from several studies to argue that withdrawal is actually nearly as effective as condoms in preventing pregnancy. The paper reports that couples who practice withdrawal perfectly over the course of a year — meaning the male partner always pulls out before ejaculation — have only a 4 percent pregnancy rate. More “typical” couples using withdrawal (those who sometimes mess up) have a pregnancy rate of 18 percent.

Those numbers are very similar to the perfect and typical-use rates for the male condom, which are 2 percent and 17 percent, respectively. The typical-use numbers are based on the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, which sampled 848 women using withdrawal and 3,800 using condoms.

…A Kinsey Institute survey of 18 to 30 year old women found that about 21 percent regularly use withdrawal, most commonly combining it with another method, such as using condoms during the more fertile days around ovulation. High school sex-ed curricula rarely delve deeply into that type of fertility awareness; in comprehensive sex-ed, girls are usually told to be wary of pregnancy on every day of their cycle. But considering that more people may be relying on withdrawal than previously assumed, some sex-educators believe teenagers ought to be introduced to fertility awareness methods as well, which are most commonly associated with married couples who oppose other forms of birth control for religious reasons.

I tend to be in favor of teaching any forms of birth control that may help teens see sex as a biological process that requires some responsibility rather than an act that should burden them for life with psycho-sexual hangups. But on the very, very slim chance that the teaching of the withdrawal method and fertility awareness made it into the educational system, there would have to be comprehensive STD lessons that came along with the program.

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