Assistant professor in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine, and a core faculty member of the Program in Public Health, at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York.
Perspect Sex Reprod Health. 2018 Sep;50(3):119-127. doi: 10.1363/psrh.12072. Epub 2018 Jul 3.
Women who view themselves as having difficulty becoming pregnant (i.e., being subfecund) may feel that they do not need to use contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancy. However, subfecundity perceptions are not always medically accurate and may therefore confer a false sense of protection. The extent to which perceived fecundity is related to contraceptive use is not well understood.
Multinomial logistic regression was used to investigate the relationship between perceived fecundity at age 25-30 and contraceptive use among 2,091 women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort.
Compared with women who considered themselves very likely to become pregnant, those who thought that they were only somewhat likely and those who viewed themselves as not very likely to do so had significantly higher risks of not using contraceptives within the next year (risk ratios, 1.9 and 2.4, respectively). Results were similar in analyses controlling for either a medical diagnosis of infertility, a history of multiple miscarriages or stillbirths, or absence of pregnancy following at least six months of unprotected sex, suggesting that perceived subfecundity operates independently of experienced subfecundity.
Because few studies have investigated fecundity perceptions in their own right, more research is needed to understand how women evaluate their fecundity and to integrate these perceptions into broader frameworks describing women's perception of pregnancy risk. Such work may help identify potential levers to improve contraceptive use.
认为自己难以怀孕（即生育能力稍弱）的女性可能认为她们不需要使用避孕药具来防止意外怀孕。然而，生育能力感知并不总是医学上准确的，因此可能会产生一种虚假的保护感。感知生育能力与避孕措施使用之间的关系程度尚不清楚。
使用多项逻辑回归分析了全国青年纵向调查 1997 队列中 2091 名女性在 25-30 岁时的感知生育能力与避孕措施使用之间的关系。
与认为自己很可能怀孕的女性相比，认为自己只是有些可能和不太可能怀孕的女性在未来一年内不使用避孕药具的风险显著更高（风险比分别为 1.9 和 2.4）。在控制不孕的医学诊断、多次流产或死胎史或至少 6 个月无保护性行为后未怀孕的情况下进行分析，结果相似，这表明感知生育能力独立于经历生育能力稍弱而发挥作用。
由于很少有研究单独调查生育能力感知，因此需要更多的研究来了解女性如何评估自己的生育能力，并将这些感知纳入描述女性对怀孕风险的认知的更广泛框架中。此类工作可能有助于确定提高避孕措施使用的潜在手段。
