All social and demographic groups are represented among women having abortions; the characteristics of this population have been discussed elsewhere. More than half of respondents (56%) were in their 20s; women in their 30s accounted for 22% of abortions and adolescents for 19%.
Seventeen percent of women were married, 67% had never been married and the remainder had previously been married; 31% of single women were cohabiting.
The majority of women (61%) had one or more children. Women with family incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty level accounted for 57% of abortions; 27% were poor (had incomes below 100% of poverty).
More than half of women obtaining abortions in 2000 (54%) had been using a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant...In 2000, approximately 15% of women had been using the most effective methods—1% used long-acting methods (sterilization, the IUD, implants or injectables) and 14% the pill. Twenty-eight percent of all women having abortions had used the male condom, down from 32% in 1994 (the only method to decline by more than three percentage points). Withdrawal and periodic abstinence had been used by roughly one in 10 women having abortions...
Decreases in income and education are associated with increased contraceptive nonuse: Women with family incomes below 300% of the federal poverty level were more likely than women with higher incomes not to be using a method of birth control in the month they became pregnant...women with less than a college degree were significantly more likely than college graduates to be nonusers...
The survey results support the concern that economic disadvantage makes it harder to obtain contraceptives. Women with incomes lower than 300% of poverty were more likely than the highest-income women to indicate this reason for not having used birth control...
Across all subgroups, women who became pregnant while using a contraceptive method were more likely to have been relying on male condoms than on any other method ...Married women and those with college degrees tend to be older than others, and these women were more likely than unmarried and less-educated women to have been using methods other than the pill or condom. Never-married women were more likely than others to have relied on the condom, whereas cohabiting women reported the highest levels of pill use in the month they became pregnant.
In 2000, 1.3% of women having abortions reported having taken emergency contraceptive pills to prevent the pregnancy...Trussell and colleagues have estimated that for each pregnancy that occurs after use of emergency contraceptive pills, three pregnancies are prevented. In 2000, 1.3 million abortions were performed in the United States. If 17,000 (1.3%)*§ pregnancies that ended in abortion occurred after the use of emergency contraceptive pills, approximately 51,000 pregnancies that would have ended in abortion were prevented...The increase in the use of emergency contraceptive pills may account for a significant part of the recent reduction in abortions nationally: The number of abortions in 2000 was 110,000 fewer than in 1994, and an estimated 47,000 more abortions were prevented by emergency contraception in 2000 than in 1994; thus, emergency contraception could account for 43% of the decrease in abortions....
On the basis of our survey findings, we estimate that of the 1.3 million women who underwent induced abortions in 2000, 608,000 had not been using a contraceptive method around the time they became pregnant, 610,000 had been using a method but not consistently or correctly, and 95,000 had thought they were using the method perfectly but became pregnant because of method failure....
Clearly, more efforts need to be made to provide health insurance coverage for poor and low-income women (and men), as well as increased funding for family planning services. Family planning and other reproductive health services need to provide women and their partners with information about and access to a wide range of methods so they can choose, and receive, the ones best suited to their current lifestyles, including newly available and highly effective methods....
Substantial proportions of adolescents who were not using contraceptives—particularly of those younger than 18—indicated that fear of their parents' finding out they were sexually active was a barrier to contraceptive use. Making sure that adolescents continue to have access to confidential reproductive health care services and increasing their awareness of these services are likely to result in greater contraceptive use and fewer unintended pregnancies.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3429402.html
