Relationship To High Risk Sex and Abortion
The current (October 2005) AAP Policy Statement on Emergency Contraception states: "The concern that widespread emergency contraception use would encourage unprotected coitus in teens is not supported in the literature."
The latest (April 2012) review by emergency contraception experts Trussell and Raymond states: "Reported evidence would seem to demonstrate convincingly that making ECPs more widely available does not increase risk-taking or adversely affect regular contraceptive use. and that women who are the most diligent about ongoing contraceptive use are those most likely to seek emergency treatment."
In France, Sweden, and Britain—where Yuzpe-regimen EC had been available by prescription for more than a decade and progestin-only EC has been available without a prescription for 8, 6, and 2 years respectively—the abortion rate was stable or higher during that time period. Another study concluded that distribution of free, advance supplies of EC to large numbers of women in Scotland did not reduce abortion rates. A randomized controlled trial of 2000 women in China compared women with advance access to EC to women without access, and noted that the pregnancy rate was the same between the two groups. The study observed that "...providing EC in advance increases use, but there is no direct evidence that it reduces unintended pregnancy" and concluded that EC may not lower abortion rates.
In September 2006, emergency contraception expert Anna Glasier wrote a BMJ editorial entitled "Emergency Contraception. Is it worth all the fuss?" that said in closing: "So is emergency contraception worth the fuss? If you are a woman who has had unprotected sex then of course it is, because emergency contraception will prevent pregnancy in some women some of the time—and if you don’t want to get pregnant anything is better than nothing. If you are the CMAJ’s editor or FDA commissioner then yes, because scientific freedom is worth the fight. If you are looking for an intervention that will reduce abortion rates, emergency contraception may not be the solution, and perhaps you should concentrate most on encouraging people to use contraception before or during sex, not after it."
Read more about this topic: Emergency Contraception
Famous quotes containing the words relationship to, relationship, high, risk and/or abortion:
“Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independence will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.”
—Women’s Liberation Workshop, Students for a Democratic Society, Radical political/social activist organization. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967)
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by and by.”
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“Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.”
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“... abortion opponents love little babies as long as they are in somebody else’s uterus.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)