It seems that sex education isn't just a problem for the under-educated teenage demographic. This article mentions women taking the acne drug isotretinoin getting pregnant despite extensive medical advice and counselling. The dangers of the drug are widely publicised for the general case anyway. Depression is the most-commonly cited. But its effects on a foetus can be pretty scary too:

If a woman becomes pregnant while taking the acne drug, her baby can suffer severe brain and heart defects, mental retardation and other abnormalities, even if the mother took only a small dose for a short period. That's a risk for 30 days after stopping the drug, too.

What exactly can these women's advice be like if they know all that but still risk getting pregnant? Unfortunately the commenters on Feministing completely miss the point of the article and start ranting about regular blood tests being an imposition because the "federal government doesn't trust adult women". Except those blood tests are a necessary part of isotretinoin treatment. Unless of course adult women can be "trusted not to get liver failure" too.

I’ve recently been working my way through Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s been hard work but worthwhile too. But let’s start at the beginning, before I start to whine too much. The book is an examination of human history since the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago. At that point, when humanity started to properly deviate from its ape ancestors and form civilisations and technologies, that things become interesting. Different peoples in different parts of the world developed at different rates. The middle east was the site of the first crop farming, while the same didn’t happen in the Americas for thousands more years. The Australian humans were still using stone-age technology when Europeans arrived a few hundred years ago. Guns, Germs and Steel is an attempt to examine what might have caused these disparities and to follow that line of reasoning.

The general conclusion is that people in different parts of the world were constrained by their geography. Why did the people in middle east get crop farming but the Australians not? Essentially, because there were more crops there to begin with. The ‘fertile crescent’ in the stretch of land from Turkey and Iran is vastly more hospitable to many types of life than Australia.

And so the reasoning follows from there. With crops and farming come the facility to support extremely large and sophisticated empires with specialised soldiers, craftsmen and bureaucrats. Elsewhere, peoples who subsisted on nuts and clams and berries could only support small family-tribes. At this level, there was no chance to develop the rich empires needed to fund the trappings of modern society. It’s just like a game of Civilisation, innit?

But back to the whining. The ideas in this book were fascinating. There was a lot of interesting stuff about the development of dangerous diseases, which I would never have even guessed at. But eventually you realise that the book has fully explained the thesis and is just ploughing through page after page — and chapter after chapter — of examples. And that does get really dry, especially with the author’s writing style which involves asking lots of rhetorical questions. It makes one feel like the classroom know-it-all who gets ignored by the teacher, even though they strain and stretch their arm in the air. “Me, me! I know! You told me in the first half of the book!”

So I have to confess I’ve given up with at least a chapter to go. I don’t often do this. I mean, he might turn round and say “actually, I was just kidding…”. But there are more tempting books waiting in my pile right now, so Mr Jared Diamond is going to find himself back on the shelf.