Unintended Pregnancy | Reproductive Health | CDC

Used in 2 entries

For each citing entry, the verbatim excerpt and Likelier's calculation notes (how the source's number was converted to the lifetime-probability framing) are shown below. Click through to read the full claim ledger.

1. [1] Condom failure Risk

   Statistic

   41.6% of US pregnancies in 2019 were unintended; rate 35.7 per 1,000 females aged 15-44

   “"The percentage of U.S. pregnancies that were unintended declined from 43.3% in 2010 to 41.6% in 2019. Unintended pregnancy rates declined by 15%, from 42.1 per 1,000 females aged 15-44 years in 2010 to 35.7 per 1,000 in 2019. Despite this progress, about 4 in 10 pregnancies in the United States are still unintended."”

   Calculation notes

   Context only, not an input to the headline. Excerpt reused from the verified citation in the getting-tubal-ligation regret-pair (accessed 2026-05-10); cdc.gov was not reachable from this session. Unintended pregnancies include those with no method in use, so this share cannot be attributed to contraceptive failure alone.
   

   Independence note: National surveillance-based estimate, independent of the method-specific failure data.

   Source date: 2024-01-01 · Accessed: 2026-05-10

2. [2] Tubal ligation Decision · inaction side

   Statistic

   Approximately 41.6% of all US pregnancies in 2019 were unintended; the unintended pregnancy rate was 35.7 per 1,000 females aged 15-44

   “"The percentage of U.S. pregnancies that were unintended declined from 43.3% in 2010 to 41.6% in 2019. Unintended pregnancy rates declined by 15%, from 42.1 per 1,000 females aged 15-44 years in 2010 to 35.7 per 1,000 in 2019. Despite this progress, about 4 in 10 pregnancies in the United States are still unintended."”

   Calculation notes

   CDC Reproductive Health fact sheet. Used as context for constructing the inaction proxy, not as a direct regret measure. Among women who chose not to pursue tubal sterilisation and subsequently experienced one or more unintended pregnancies, a subset will retrospectively regret the inaction. The 5% proxy is derived from the assumption that roughly 10-15% of women who delay or forgo tubal sterilisation eventually experience an unintended pregnancy they would have preferred to avoid, and approximately one-third to one-half of these women will express lasting regret about not having acted. This construction is speculative: no direct survey measures this. The 5% is an order-of-magnitude placeholder proxy -- see caveats.
   

   Source date: 2024-01-01 · Accessed: 2026-05-10

Also cited in these entries

HealthDirect

Condom failure

What are the odds of getting pregnant when relying on condoms or other contraception?

1 in 7.7 lifetime(13%)activity