birth-control, condomsIf a male and female couple are in a trusting relationship, and both are clean from STDs, my assumption is that there’s no concern between the two about contracting sexually-transmitted diseases.
Given this assumption, condom usage becomes primarily an issue of birth control and less so an issue of disease control. Is it safe to depend on the high success rate of your partner’s birth control method?
For example, Implanon has a 0.05% failure rate. However, over the longish-term (say, having sex 40 times), that failure rate seems like it could jump to almost 2%. The same goes for any of the >99% success methods; IUDs share the same problem, to a lesser extent. Is it dependable over the long-term?
No form of birth control is foolproof. (I know this from personal experience.) Choosing a birth control method is something partners should agree upon together and there are a lot of factors beyond mere effectiveness to consider.
Condoms have some unique attributes:
On the downside, many people (both male and female) find condoms uncomfortable and awkward. Since condoms are also one-time-use and aren’t usually covered by health insurance, they can be more expensive than other methods. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention condoms are not particularly effective. Much of the typical failure rate stems from human error. (There is also a failure rate for disease prevention.)
If effectiveness is your top priority and both partners are ok with the downsides of condoms, there’s no reason not to use them in conjunction with other methods (see #3 above). But many couples in the situation you describe do not find the extra pregnancy prevention worthwhile. This is something partners need to discuss and find some agreement on their own.
Birth control is not always effective, and using condoms will reduce the chance of pregnancy even further.
Whether condoms are “necessary,” however, depends on what an acceptable level of risk is for you. If the consequence of a pregnancy is an adoption or an abortion, then you may be willing to accept this risk in the long term; if on the other hand you are likely to raise any pregnancies as your kids and this would severely impact your life plans then it is probably better to continue using condoms.
If STIs are not a concern then you then you may consider switching to lambskin condoms, which are not effective against all STIs but are preferred by many people for their more carnal feel.
“Trusting relationship” is hypothetical and an uncertainty, therefore there is still risk of transmission of disease, even if there is a low probability, if your partner cheats or innocently acquires a virus via nonsexual means. Avoid that delusion.
Also, there is almost no way to guarantee anyone is “clean from STDs” – HIV can take as long as 18 months to test positive, others may lie dormant for years, yet the individual is still a carrier of the disease.
So the answer to your strictly hypothetical question is that your assumption is correct; however, in reality, condoms will provide increased security and protection against STDs, especially with a relatively new partner.
The temptation is to think, Well, we’ve agreed to be monogamous and it’s been a few months so let’s stop using condoms, but the risk is probably greater than one might realize, depending on the sexual activity. I can relate to this rational, since it’s not unusual to dislike using condoms, but it can have severe consequences, unfortunately.
No.
In your described case the condom is just an additional safety measure. There is always a risk of pregnancy!
Wearing a condom will greatly reduce the risk of a pregnacy.
So it is not neccesarry since the chances are very low in any scenario where the female birth-control is applied corretly.
But if you are concerend about a pregnancy you (as the male) should use condoms since they are not too big of a bother and reduce the chances a fair bit.
The failure rate of implanon as given is not 0.05% for every time you have sex, but the percentage of women who have gotten pregnant within the first year of taking it. The number of times you have sex has nothing to do with this estimated probability.
One of the benefits of implants versus condoms is that the typical-failure rate is identical to the perfect-use failure rate, as no human error is possible. The same number for condoms may be much higher in practice than in perfect circumstances, Wikipedia lists a typical-failure rate of 15% for condoms. (Wikipedia: Comparison of birth control methods)
If a yearly 1 in 2000 risk of pregnancy is too high for you two, it can be combined with condom use, and the resulting risk is easily approximated by multiplying probabilities.
Note that the commonly used contraceptive pill is listed as a typical-failure of 9%, and condoms as 15%, meaning that the approximate percentage of women getting pregnant within the first year of use is about 1.35%. Clearly, in the case of typical use of contraceptive pills there is much more reason to add an extra safety measure than with implanted contraceptives.
(typical-failure rates from wikipedia).
No, condoms are not necessary if she has an implant or IUD. Whether condoms are necessary with any other method of BC depends on your tolerance for an unwanted pregnancy.
As Spork said, those .05% failure rates are not per use. They're per year. As in, one pregnancy per 2,000 years of use. According to the most recent comparison of contraception effectiveness that I can find (NYTimes), the implant has a lower risk of pregnancy than male or female sterilization!
For all practical purposes, barring a gross failure by the person inserting the implant or a major medication conflict that no one catches, the risk of pregnancy with implants is effectively zero, which was the number of unwanted pregnancies in a recent large, long-term test of Implanon.
For a more in-depth discussion of using condoms with other forms of birth control, I recommend reading: Dual Protection Use to Prevent STIs and Unintended Pregnancy, a collection of articles on multiple studies dealing with dual use mainly for disease prevention as well as pregnancy.
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