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Comment by ane | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago my wife and I agreed we'd actively start making a baby and quit contraceptives. She was on the pill (progestogen-only) and we'd been using it for the better part of three years. Worked fine, she took it religiously at the same time every day.

So we agreed to quit, and the next day she comes to me, awkwardly, saying "It worked!" half-jokingly. I stared at the pregnancy test, positive and unambiguous as ever. At the second test, too.

Turns out she'd been already pregnant for almost a month. That kind of contraceptive is only 99% effective. Our daughter was born eight months later.

Safe to say, the missing percentage is warranted.

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Who first started the conversation? I wonder if the hormones swirling through her system made her more likely to feel ready for a child. Or perhaps the pregnancy induced change in her pheromones suddenly made you feel more nurturing of her. Probably not, but it's funny how sometimes things work out like that

Typically, it’s 99% per year or something like that. Even with perfect use that’s a 1 in 10 chance per decade.

Yeah I always wondered what the 99% actually means. 99% of the times you have intercourse? 99% out of 100? 99% per some time frame?

The pill always worried me a bit when younger because most women I knew didnt take it religiously at the same time everyday and it wasnt clear if we were then... 75% safe? 50% safe? 98% safe?

I guess it was enough safe enough for me but I imagine it could have gone the other way pretty easily.

Birth control metrics are almost always phrased as "X % couples having regular intercourse won't get pregnant." So pill and IUD being 99% means 1 / 100 heterosexual couples will get pregnant every year, on average.

Yeah, my wife an I had the conversation and decided that she was going to go off of birth control in a few weeks. Two weeks later, she missed her period.

I promised to get a vasectomy on the spot.

A few weeks later she learned that her sister also had an oops. They both gave birth within a few days of each other.

I thought the contraceptive doesn't prevent the pregnancy but just causes the body to menstruate regardless. So she might have been pregnant many times but this time it wasn't terminated by mensuration? (I'm certainly not very confident in my understanding.)

No, this is incorrect.

> The birth control pill works by stopping sperm from joining with an egg. When sperm joins with an egg it’s called fertilization.

> The hormones in the pill safely stop ovulation. No ovulation means there’s no egg for sperm to fertilize, so pregnancy can’t happen.

> The pill’s hormones also thicken the mucus on the cervix. This thicker cervical mucus blocks sperm so it can’t swim to an egg — kind of like a sticky security guard.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/birth-...

Or as my partner says: my tummy is making a baby nest, but it’s always empty.

This is correct with the additional caveat that the pill also thins the uterine lining, making it difficult for the embryo to implant in the rare event of fertilization. So for people concerned about avoiding an abortion, the pill rarely, but not never, results in abortion.

I vaguely remember misinformation about birth control in Catholic school. They told us that IUDs kill fertilized eggs.

It was completely wrong.

If the timeline of conception feels off or extraordinary, you owe it to yourself to get a DNA test. 18 years is a long time friend. Trust but verify.

I’m…not sure I follow. Are you implying that her contraceptive pill was somehow less effective against the sperm of someone else?

That there are situations where women have affairs and get pregnant in very narrow timelines then have their partner think it’s their child.

Putting the morality of this aside and speaking practically, unsuspecting men should have a DNA test if the timeline of conception feels off or extraordinary.

Does it really matter whose child it is? You seem to be writing this as if she might give birth to a goblin or something like that.

I can't see what's "speaking practically" and "putting the morality aside" here, because there's not really any practical difference.

It's a question of trust, for starters?

So what is the test that the husband should undergo? I mean why only think about the faithfulness of the wife?

A woman always knows that the child is hers. It's not a symmetrical issue

> Does it really matter whose child it is?

I'm not sure I understand. Are you asking why it matters for a man to unknowingly raise another man's child, which his wife conceived while being unfaithful to him?

>Does it really matter whose child it is?

Umm what? Do you not see the inherent breakage of trust if your wife is having sex with someone else in a monogamous relationship and then trying to pass off someone else' kid as yours?

It doesn't matter for this story of contraception not working 100%.

1) You seem to have totally focused on the "parent" role, and forgotten the "partner" aspect. This has major implications for the relationship.

2) The practical difference is choice. Biological parents are pretty stuck. People in this situation aren't at all.

Nope. Once you have kids being the parent is the most important thing.

We should note that, yes, being the parent is the most important thing, but the quality and effort put into the partnership has a substantial effect on the quality of the parenting.

How is raising someone else’s child a moral obligation? If a man’s wife has a child with her lover her lover has an obligation to raise the child. He’s the father. The mother’s husband has no relation to the child.

Yes! Especially several years later. Stupid shit happens, to all of us. And if the kid has 'adopted' the father, then for many years it will be outright traumatic to cut the relationship and trust if that kid just because if some test. Oh, not my DNA, then I don't love you? How narcissistic of a father would that be? Joseph of Nazareth would like to have a word, too...

No, there should be very good and compelling reasons to request a DNA test.

Making a man raise someone else’s child is not “stupid shit”. It is a calculated major betrayal.

If Joseph chose to raise someone else’s child that’s nice for him. Great. He made a morally laudable, superogatory choice. That’s very different from being betrayed by your loved one and deceived into raising someone else’s child.

> Joseph of Nazareth would like to have a word, too...

Joseph was going to "divorce her quietly"[1] until an angel intervened.[2] He was kind (was not going to cause her more trouble than necessary) but he also wasn't going to raise another man's child brought about by his almost-wife's (at the time, he thought) infidelity. I think many of us would also reconsider when directed to raise the scion of a deity by a literal angel.

[1] https://biblehub.com/matthew/1-19.htm

[2] https://biblehub.com/matthew/1-24.htm (the interaction was the the verses prior.)

What are the compelling reasons not to get a DNA test as a man (when a woman is claiming, “You are the biological father of this baby.”)?

Is it expensive or illegal or will your friends shame you or the woman will be angry?

In this case, it would show that he doesn't trust his wife.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, if it's truly his child, why would his wife be opposed to verifying that? Not to mention that it can likely be done without her knowledge.

Suggesting that not only do you not trust your wife but you also don’t trust her so much so that you get a paternity test without her knowledge shows a huge lack of faith in the relationship, and I would caution against this. Please remember the original circumstance is that a woman ends up pregnant on an imperfect birth control; there’s no reason or contextual evidence for any sort of cheating behavior. Assuming your partner is cheating with no evidence sucks. Assuming your partner might be cheating so much so you have to get a paternity test sucks even more for the non-cheating partner.

This is in situations where a heterosexual woman gets suspicious if her partner has literally any female friends. What if she started going around and wanting paternity tests of your friend group if they happen to be pregnant, just to make sure you didn’t cheat with any of your friends, despite you remaining faithful the entire time?

It’s very kind of you to write this all out, but frankly if you’re the kind of person who worries about stuff like that you’ll poison your relationship with distrust regardless. If not this than something else.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone can’t worry about stuff like this. Emotions like worry can happen as a result of prior trauma, generalized anxiety disorder, and several illnesses that have paranoia in their symptom profile. It’s fine to have worries and that manage your worries in a healthy manner, such as therapy, medication when appropriate, meditation, and speaking transparently to your partner to try and figure out what is triggering your worry response (rubber ducking your own brain!).

It’s important to separate emotion from action. You can experience an anxiety inducing thought (such as my partner might be cheating on me) and behave in a variety of healthy and unhealthy ways.

Like OP said: trust but verify. Speaking from experience, lol.

I’m sorry your trust was violated. Your traumatic experience where your trust was violated shouldn’t be used as a warning label for others. There is no reason to advocate that other people behave as if their partners are unfaithful without prior evidence because you personally were wronged in a deeply hurtful way.

It is important to healthily evaluate what is a relatively uncommon but seriously hurtful thing that happened to oneself and how that distorts one’s understanding of what’s normal behavior in intimate relationships.

But how else are you going to get evidence? Doing a paternity test is the act of gathering data which could further be used as evidence of faithfulness of your partner.

Or else it's just blind trust without any firm footing in reality.

If you can't be arsed to do the test for a ONCE or TWICE in a lifetime kind of event with long term consequences because you somehow feel hurt that your partner isn't a fool who builds his life around blind faith.. well, there's not much to be said...

This is a trauma response style logic where the bad/harmful thing is the default and the healthy thing needs to be proven. The fact of the matter is that cheating to the point of clandestinely having children is abnormal and unusual. It isn’t blind faith that your partner is faithful; your partner will show you their faithfulness just by the act of being your partner. It’s not staying out without explanation. It’s emotional engagement with the relationship. It’s transparency when things get boring. It’s the labor in keeping the relationship fresh and interesting. Overlooking this to lean towards mistrust also devalues the labor of your partner and shows your bias towards past trauma. I understand this thing is big stakes and is very hurtful, but even grand hurts doesn’t justify no longer paying attention to basic reality for over-cautious behavior.

There's no trauma response, data suggests that cheating is common. Thereon following through with the baseless assumption that this totally won't happen to you is downright foolish.

All this wishy washy pretense about "emotional engagement" comes off as super dishonest, just to weasel your way out of doing a test (which should be a standard procedure anyway).

That's one of those times where the faithfulness has to be put to test.

Trying to weasel your way out of doing it via emotional manipulations is more of a red flag than anything.

IMO you make a wise point:

Doing a paternity test may necessarily or inadvertently reveal to his wife a limit of his trust for her.

What are compelling reasons to get one? Worst case scenario, you have baby.

I do not want to invest significant resources into progeny that is not my own. Doing a paternity test reduces the possibility of this.

Although I realize there are people that think this way, this is totally removed from the way my mind works.

You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

> You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

Thinking about raising a baby from some other father activates my disgust reaction. But maybe it’s more related to the idea of the woman’s (hidden?) infidelity than the baby itself.

> There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

I don’t see other people’s difficulties as relevant to my preferences.

For example, homeless people eating from trash cans doesn’t affect my dietary choices.

Your intuitions about family and human relations are deeply abnormal and you should be aware of that for the future when you talk to people.

I would say it is more likely that consciously or unconsciously the woman started missing pills the month before. The couple was already considering it so it wasn't a big deal if she missed some pills. My wife and I were very fertile, we got pregnant on the first try every time we tried. I suspect that the birth control was barely working.

We suspected this as well. She is lactose intolerant and has IBS, this can cause complications with the efficacy of the pill.

We weren't making it easy for the contraceptive either. I mean, several times a day, every day, for years... One of them was bound to get through eventually anyway.

I've understood that this kind of contraceptive makes only conception extremely difficult, not impossible. She was still ovulated (tested), and had regular periods.

It was extremely easy for us to conceive our second child. Now we have two pretty kids!

But we have to be really, really, really careful, lest we have yet another...

Assuming you’re living close to your partner, the actual amount of effort necessary would be a lot. The very narrow time window described is actually multiple weeks long. This is because when you go off hormonal birth control the first thing that happens is you have a period, then you need to stop taking it long enough for your body to rebuild the lining enough to be receptive.

You really have to not be paying attention to your partner, or your partner and your lifestyle is that neither of you live closely, for this to just happen.

Additionally, I feel this amount of mistrust should say a lot more about the relationship than about the woman. If you don’t trust your partner not to go off her birth control for multiple weeks to get secretly pregnant with someone else, why are you their partner? frankly your partner deserves better than you.

> Turns out she'd been already pregnant for almost a month. That kind of contraceptive is only 99% effective. Our daughter was born eight months later.

This kind of "oops" is very common.

If/when you're done having children, or have no desire for children, you really need to get surgery.

My interpretation of the events and GPs question is that the timeline of intercourse/conception wasn't suspect, only the efficacy of the contraception. The only scenario where deception and the suggested test of such makes sense in this case would be if the partner had stopped using contraception earlier by choice and had an affair.

I don't know why DNA tests are not standard practice. It's easy and you are already at the hospital.

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