A few years ago the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released a study based on survey data about young unmarried adults’ use of and knowledge about contraception. The ignorance and misperceptions are often shocking. I asked the organization if they could sort responses by socioeconomic class of the respondents; they didn’t have income data, but they did have information about respondents’ educational attainment, which tends to be a good proxy for income and employment prospects.

The numbers were disappointing pretty much across the board, but they tended to be worse for those with less education. Twenty-somethings with college degrees report using birth control much more consistently than people with no more than a high school diploma. People with less educational attainment were also much more likely to say they know little or nothing about condoms and the pill. And the amount of mistrust, misinformation and old-wives’-taling about birth control was astounding among the less educated, though not wholly absent among college grads.

Among unmarried people in their 20s, for example, people with no more than a high school education are almost four times as likely to (incorrectly) believe that having sex while standing up is an effective form of birth control.

When it comes to real forms of birth control, there is a tremendous amount of skepticism that they actually do anything. With “perfect” use, for example, the pill is estimated to be 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancies. But lots of young singles, and especially less-educated young singles, perceive that the pill doesn’t work most of the time:

Many believe birth control doesn’t matter anyway, because they don’t think they can have kids no matter what they do. About a quarter of people with a high school diploma or less think they are infertile:

For the most part, these respondents don’t think they’re infertile because a medical professional diagnosed them as infertile. Isabel Sawhill, whose new book on curbing unplanned births I highly recommend, suggested that the belief might come about because people assume if they’ve had unprotected sex before and didn’t get pregnant, that must mean they are unable to get pregnant. So why not roll the dice again?

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Of course, for many of these women, their unsubstantiated beliefs about their infertility turn out to be completely wrong and lead to unplanned pregnancies. A recent CDC report included a survey of women who had unintended births after unprotected sex and found that the most common reason women cited for not using birth control was that they thought they couldn’t get pregnant. Among moms with a high school education or less, 42 percent said they hadn’t used birth control because they wrongly believed they couldn’t get pregnant.

Reading through responses to some of the other questions in the Fog Zone report, you’ll find a pervasive distrust of birth control, especially among the less-educated: