Court and press: Battle ahead? Raw' By JAMES WECHSLER places fo PRESIDENT Nixon and Attorney as secure General Mitchell may have hope tha lost more than a legal battle in the somethin Supreme Court. For many pub- freedom lishers and editors throughout the ernment country the story beyond the bul- DURIN letin heralding the 6-3 courtroom cording I victory of The Times and the Wash- survey,A ington Post is the reminder that endorsen another Nixon term would surely papers w open the way to a more succpssful bert Hun assault on the First Amendment. In vie What we have won is a reprieve decision in a dramatic race against time. with the Justice Hugo Black is now 85; Jus- all reaso tice Douglas, at 72, has long been plagued by illness. Two additional But in Nixon men can destroy the fragile not begi majority that saved the press from It was in an unprecedented era of "prior re- New Ye straint" this time. It must also be thereafte added, on the basis of the grudg- citadelsc ing tones of his assent, that Byron long bee; "Whizzer" White was apparently "Eastern brought kicking and screaming to may wel the side of the majority. He can insensiti hardly be called a pillar of free- which n dom. land" of menaced I MAY be too sanguine in sug- gesting that the shock-impact of What this encounter will sway many anticipate press voices when the next Presi- was the dential campaign begins. Yet the ret" doe evidence suggests that there was time adn remarkably broad - and biparti- obtained san - press resistance to this lishers a Mitchell offensive; some of the fight for' staunchest objectors were Nixon zled' fans in 1968. Thus,a It may be sadly true that some Court ac of the papers heard from in this tion had challenge to repression h a v e shambles shown less diligent concern for the from the Bill of Rights when institutions and tion Cec individuals other than the press been de were threatened. After all, Mr. press s Nixon bluntly warned during his judges s campaign that he was resolved to PLEAS remake the Warren court in his was, th own image; few press lords ima- temperer gined at the time that their own For on liberties might so swiftly be tar- start, th gets of a reduced regard in high censors sex information Con trace or rights too long viewed e. One cannot suppress the t some men have learned g about the indivisibility of from this brush with gov- censorship. EG the 1968 campaign, ac- o an Editor and Publisher Mr. Nixon had the editorial sent of 634 daily news- while only 146 backed Hu- mphrey. w of that arithmetic, his to invite a confrontation press may seem to defy on. fact, of course, this did n as a sweeping crusade. nitially aimed only at The ork Times and, shortly r, the Washington Post, of what Spiro Agnew had n depicting as the cinister Establishment." There 1 have been a blundering vity about the extent to ewspapers in the "heart- f the nation would feel by the proceedings. almost certainly was un- ed by the administration fashion in which the "sec- uments would spread each new restraining order was - and how many pub- nd editors would carry the ward as others were muz- by the time the Supreme ted the government's posi- become a public relations s; Sen. Gravel's excerpts documents were flooding ciated Press wire. Opera- isorship had in actuality stroyed by a memorable mutiny even before the poke. SURABLE as the outcome e celebration should be d by many considerations. e thing, as indicated at the e setback inflicted on the is not irretrievable; Mr. Nixon's reelection could quickly establish a new majority on the court. Moreover, the Vietnam war goes on, and we have not heard the last word about the Pentagon papers. It will not be too long before dema- gogues begin ascribing any new reverses on that front to the dis- closures; Solicitor General Gris- wold opened the door to such rhe- toric when he described the varie- ties of future calamity that might ensue if the government lost its case. Justice Blackmun's dissent crudely encouraged such hysteria. Mr. Nixon's gift for scapegoat- hunting was demonstrated long ago. And in much of the country there remains confusion and unease. A Newsweek poll this week reported that 48 per cent of those inter- viewed disapproved the injunction moves while 33 per cent approved and 19 per cent had no opinion. But the same poll reported that 47 per cent regarded the danger that."na- tional security might be harmed" as a weightier concern than the freedom of the press had been vio- lated"; 34 per cent disagreed. In short, a great legal test is over but the turmoil endures. Its echoes will be audible during the long pre-election months of 1972; there is no reason to believe that the Administration has been sob- ered by this defeat, or that it has acquired any new reverence for the Bill of Rights. At this juncture it may be prudent to invoke all our powers of prayer for the health of those judges who held the line for the First Amendment. Until at least November, 1972, they are truly in- dispensable men, (New York east The Editorial Page of The Michigan Daily is open to any- one who wishes to submit articles. Generally speaking, all articles should be less than 1,000 words. x Big Brother is monitoring you 420 Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, Mich. Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of the author. This must be noted in all reprints. Friday, July 9, 1971 News Phone: 764-0552 NIGHT EDITOR: ANITA CRONE ptive effectiveness 9. . Sitmmer Edi/torial Staf MARCIA ABRAMSON LARRY LEMPERT Co-Editor Co-Editor ROBERT CONROW s.... ............. ..... ........t......t...... Books Editor JIM JUDKIS ...... ...................... . . Photography Editor NIGHT EDITORS: Anita Crone Tammy Jacobs .Alan Lenhoff, Jonathan Miller. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS: Patricia E. Bader, James Irwin, Christopher Parks, Zachary Schiller. Stuattttaer Business Staff JIM STOREY , .. . .T JANET ENGL . .... FRAN HYMEN .. BECKY VAN DYKE BILL ABBOTT,.... RICK CORNFELD .. SANDI GENIS ..,.. . ...... Business Manager ... Display Advertising Classified Advertising Circulation Department General Office Assistant .Sports Editor Associate Sports Editor (EDITOR'S NOTE: This regular question-and-answer column on matters of sesual concern is being published ins-operation with the Office of Student services. Ques- tions should be sent to Sox 25, The Daily, 420 Maynard, or phoned in- to 76-GUIDE, the Counseling Sees- ires' 24-houc counseling and refer- ral service.) By ROBERT KOOP Q. You said that the condom was effective 80 to 90 percent of the time. What does that mean? Does that mean that if I use a condom ten times my wife will get pregnant once? . A. No. And I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I'm afraid I fell into the old academic trap of as- suming that everyone understood my jargon. So many people (I've discovered) are confused about statistics -on contraceptive meth- ods that I think I'll give you all a complete explanation. All the statistics I'll give you - and probably all the ones you'll come across - are measures of use-effectiveness. What t h a t means is that they tell you how successful a method is when it's used by real people in their real lives. It is not a measurement of theoretical effectiveness or of effectiveness under laboratory conditions. This is the way it's figured out: 1300 multiplied by the total num- ber of conceptions divided by the total number of months of ex- posurenequals the failure rate per hundred woman years. This is what all that means: The formula assumes that a woman ovulates thirteen times a year. That's thirteen times she can get pregnant. That's multi- plied by 100 to make it come out as a percentage. Total number of conceptions'-is just that - full-term pregnan-' cies, miscarriages, abortions. To- tal number of months of exposure is also just that. It doesn't count months when the woman is al- ready pregnant, when she's not having regular heterosexual con- tact, or when she's not ovulating for some reason unrelated to the method of contraception being checked out. For example, if 50 women use an IUD for ten months and only one gets pregnant, the formula says: 1300 times I divided by 500, or 2.6 per cent. This figure, the failure rate per hundred woman years, can be thought of either as the num- ber of unwanted pregnancies that would occur in a hundred women over one year or that would occur in one woman over a hundred years of fertility and regular in- tercourse. If 'you're not planning to be fertile for a hundred years, it might be easier to think of it as four times the number of times you can expect to get pregnant over a twenty-five year period. It's interesting to note that the failure rate for unprotected in- tercourse is 40 - which means that you can expect to have about ten or twelve kids in your life- time if you don't do anything about it. So, anyway, back to the ques- tion. What I meant when I said that was that the failure rate per hundred women years for con- doms is between ten and twenty. So if you use a condom regularly for twenty-fives years you can expect two to five pregnancies. On the other hand, there's a bit of a problem here. Statistics are only statistics, and you are you. There's a lot of evidence that motivation is a big determining factor in the failure of contra- ceptives. That is, a man who be- lieves that a condom dulls his pleasure may "forget" it every so often. A woman who finds in- serting a diaphragm distasteful may "forget" to use it once in a while. If you're highly motivated and you're conscientious about what- ever method you use, your chanc- es of failure may be a good bit lower than those of the average woman or man. Theoretically, given conscien- tious use, the condom has a fail- ure rate per hundred woman years (hpy) of from five to zero. The Pill, theroetically 100 per cent effective, has a failure rate per hpy of 0.05 - probably mostly caused by women forgetting to take one every day. For you information, here are the failure rates for most contra- ceptive methods: The Pill ....... . 0.05 Condom and foam .. 0.1 - 5.0 IUD ..............1.5 - 8.0 Condom ............. 5 - 20 Diaphragm and jelly . 10 - 20 Vaginal spermicides 15 - 25 Rhythm method ... 15 - 30. . Coitus interruptus .. 20 - 30 Nothing at all ..........40 Letters to The Daily should be mailed to the Editorial Di- rector or delivered to Ma r y Rafferty in the Student Pub- lications business office in the Michigan Daily building. Let- ters should be typed, double- spaced and normally should not exceed 250 words. The Editorial Directors reserve the right to edit all letters sub- mitted. I Sun'mer Sports Staff The only bad thing about being part of this fad is when it's over we'll still be dogs!"