Fact: the majority of Canadians support birth control

The most surprising thing about the (now refuted) Conservative decision to exclude contraception from maternal health initiative for developing countries is that a sizable, if not vast, majority of Canadians supports the use of birth control.

This is not social commentary, this is a fact. It is based on statistics and logical extrapolations from statistics.

Look at the chart at the bottom of this article (the article itself is irrelevant). There are 11 million prescriptions for contraceptives issued in Canada every year out of our population of 33 million.

Unless there have been recent innovations of which I'm unaware (and if there have, please do let me know in the comments), the contraceptives for which a prescription is required are only used by women, i.e. on or in the woman's body. Most often, when contraceptives are being used, there is at least one man and at least one woman involved in the relationship. So if we use a really extremely cautiously low estimate that half of the women using contraceptives have a male partner who actively supports their contraceptive use (and I do think the number must in reality be much higher - if it were only 50% our society would be far more dysfunctional), that would mean that half of all Canadians are actively involved in and supportive of family planning using prescription contraceptives. If every single one of the prescription-contraceptive-using women has a partner who actively supports her contraception use, this number increases to two-thirds of all Canadians.

On top of this one-half to two-thirds of Canadians, there are a number of other demographics of which at least some people support the use of birth control. (Because we're starting at 50% as a baseline, the numerical value of "some" isn't especially important.) The largest of these demographics will be people who are now too old to conceive. This is a large demographic because it includes the baby boomers - people like my parents who came of age during the sexual revolution and with the advent of the Pill. It's safe to say a large majority of this demographic used birth control during their fertile years, or the sexual revolution wouldn't have played out the way it did.

Other groups who support birth control but wouldn't show up in these statistics include:

- People who use non-prescription contraception. This includes condoms (male and female), spermicide, IUDs, and diaphragms.
- People who do use contraception to plan their families, but are currently in the having babies portion of family planning and therefore aren't using any contraception at the moment.
- People who did use contraception to plan their families, but got sterilized after their families were complete.
- People who do use contraception when they're in a sexual relationship, but are currently not in a sexual relationship.
- People who engage only in same-sex relationships, but have no objection to other people they have nothing to do with managing their private lives as they see fit. (This is likely to be a very high percentage of people who engage only in same-sex relationships; the fact that same-sex relationships have for so long be persecuted by outsiders who have nothing to do with them, this demographic is more likely not want to go around persecuting others for their personal choices).
- People who are infertile, but have no objection to others planning their families as they see fit.
- People who don't engage in family planning themselves, but have no objection to others doing so.

All the demographics that I have listed above consist only of adults. However, the 33 million baseline I used for the population of Canada is our entire population, including children. Children under the age of, say, 10 should be subtracted from this baseline, because they probably wouldn't even know about the concept of contraception.

So based on these numbers, I'm really surprised they thought it politically viable even for a minute to exclude contraception from maternal health. There is no way to make the numbers conclude anything but that the majority of Canadians support it.