Unplanned pregnancies are a significant problem in the United States. According to a 2012 Brookings Institution report, more than 90 percent of abortions occur due to unintended pregnancy.
Each year, about 50 percent of all pregnancies that occur in the US are not planned, a number far higher than is reported in other developed countries. About half of these pregnancies result from women not using contraception and the other half from incorrect or irregular use.
A new study by investigators at Washington University reports that providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduces unplanned pregnancies and cuts abortion rates by a range of 62 to 78 percent compared to the national rate.
.. From 2008 to 2010, annual abortion rates among study participants ranged from 4.4 to 7.5 per 1,000 women. This is a substantial drop (ranging from 62 to 78 percent) compared to the national rate of 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available.
The lower abortion rates among Choice study participants also is considerably less than the rates in St. Louis city and county, which ranged from 13.4 to 17 per 1,000 women for the same years.
Among girls ages 15 to 19 who had access to free birth control provided in the study, the annual birth rate was 6.3 per 1,000, far below the U.S. rate of 34.3 per 1,000 for girls the same age.
.. While birth control pills are the most commonly used reversible contraceptive in the United States, their effectiveness hinges on women remembering to take a pill every day and having easy access to refills.
In contrast, IUDs and implants are inserted by health-care providers and are effective for 5 to 10 years and 3 years, respectively. Despite their superior effectiveness over short-term methods, only a small percentage of U.S. women using contraception choose these methods. Many can’t afford the cost of IUDs and implants, which can cost more than $800 and may not be covered by insurance.
An abortion is like a fire department — you never think you’ll need one until you really, really do. You’re smart to map out an emergency plan, Abby, especially at a time when the future of reproductive rights is so uncertain.
I’ve been polling friends all week, and it appears that most people have no idea how much an abortion costs. In my early 20s, I naïvely assumed that if you could get yourself to a Planned Parenthood — not an easy or inexpensive feat, in many states, but doable in New York City — they’d “take care of it,” money being no object. Then a friend of mine got pregnant by accident, went to Planned Parenthood, and still had to come up with $500 for the procedure. Her experience woke me up to the fact that an abortion is far from free, even in a relatively high-access area like Manhattan.
According to Planned Parenthood itself, an in-clinic abortion (also known as a surgical abortion) can cost between $400 and $1,500 in the first trimester, whereas a medication abortion (also known as the abortion pill) usually costs between $400 and $800. The price also depends on where you seek care (hospitals are often more expensive), and how long you’ve been pregnant — the longer you wait, the fewer options you have, and the greater the expense. A second-trimester abortion can top $2,000 — not including related costs like travel or taking time off work (which, in certain industries, could jeopardize your employment altogether).
PROVIDING FREE BIRTH CONTROL DOES REDUCE ABORTION RATES
Colorado provides a real-life experiment on whether providing safe, effective, long-acting birth control can reduce unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The state’s Department of Public Health and Environment got private funding in 2008 for a program to provide long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as IUDs and hormone implants, to low-income women for little or no cost.
Trends in abortion between 1997 and 2014Guttmacher Institute
“The Colorado Family Planning Initiative helped cut the abortion rate nearly in half for women aged 15-19 and by 18 percent for women aged 20-24,” the department said in a 2017 report. “Between 2009 and 2014, birth and abortion rates both declined by nearly 50 percent among teens aged 15-19 and by 20 percent among young women aged 20-24.”
ABORTION IS VERY COMMON IN THE U.S.
“In the United States, where one half of all pregnancies are unintended, almost one third of women will seek an abortion by age 45,” ACOG says.
A 2016 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 45 percent of all pregnancies among U.S. women in 2011 were unintended, and 42 percent of them these unintended pregnancies ended in abortion.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 19 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion in 2014, a total of 926,200 abortions. That was down 12 percent from 2011. The 2014 abortion rate of 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women was the lowest rate ever measured. In 1973, the rate was 16.3 abortions per 1,000 women, aged 15 to 44.
Chuck Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion, added other possible causes: “a higher percentage of women today decide to carry an unexpected pregnancy to term, teenagers are less sexually active and with fewer partners, pro-life views are more prevalent among the rising generation than they were 40 years ago.”
He called the decline “sharp and consistent” and pointed out that the U.S. abortion rate is half of what it was in 1980.
While the abortion rate decreased across all age groups in 2015, women in their 20s accounted for nearly 60 percent of all abortions. The abortion rate was 19.9 for women ages 20-24 and 17.9 for ages 25-29.
White women had the lowest abortion rate, at 6.8 abortions per 1,000 women, and black women had the highest abortion rate at 25.1 per 1,000. “The findings in this report indicate that the number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions have declined across all race/ethnicity groups but that well-documented disparities persist,” Tara C. Jatlaoui, from the CDC’s division of reproductive health, and co-authors wrote.
There was also considerable variation among jurisdictions, from a rate of 2.8 abortions in South Dakota to 23.1 abortions in New York.
One major source of controversy in recent years has been the widespread availability of medical abortions or pills such as RU-486 that can be taken to induce abortion without surgical intervention. In 2015, about a quarter of all abortions involved medical abortion, which can be done only early in a pregnancy.
