It took an unplanned pregnancy to get Helen Denise thinking about finding a better way for women to learn when they are entering their most fertile period each month.
Tag: unplanned pregnancy
Can You Imagine a World Without Condoms for Safe Sex?
Currently, women who want to both avoid an unplanned pregnancy and prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have no choices other than the male or female condom. But there are new forms of female-focused methods in development that combine contraception with the prevention of STIs – including HIV – and they’re called Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs). Public health leaders expect that they will change the face of women’s global health.
Why We Keep Accidentally Getting Pregnant
A fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of sex and the function of birth control appears to underlie the country’s remarkable rate of unwanted pregnancies.
Thirty-seven percent of babies born in the U.S. are the result of unplanned pregnancies. The National Survey of Family Growth, released this week by the CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics, suggests a number of possibilities for why this is, all of which merit further attention. But the leading reason that women eschewed birth control? They “did not think they would get pregnant.”
Because the survey looks only at unintended births — and not unintended pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or abortion — this means that there are 290,000 babies born each year to mothers who believed their coming into existence was a statistical improbability. Other data has indicated that 60 percent of women who gave birth to unplanned babies had not used contraception when they became pregnant; the survey indicates that a majority of them must misunderstand either the connection between sex and childbirth or how strongly correlated the two actually are, seeing pregnancy instead as an “it can’t happen to me” scenario.