Women’s health should always come before politics. Let’s get ourselves some EC access - sign the petition today.
Contraception and other sexual health services, information and education are a basic right, earned through decades of struggle.
But through stealthy funding cuts, sneaky policy changes and increasingly aggressive opposition our rights are being eroded.
We can’t let that happen! Join our campaign and speak up for the majority of the population who need and use these essential services and information. Refuse to go backwards!
![[Image shows a little blonde white boy in an orange life jacket, holding a oar on a jetty over some some water.
Text reads, “We should ban life jackets & other floatation devices.
They only encourage risky behaviour. The only 100% effective way to prevent drowning is total abstinence from going in the water.
And if you do, by chance, find yourself struggling with drowning, then no life-saving or otherwise procedure or act should be allowed to be administered. You got yourself into this mess, you have to live with the consequences.
You should see drowning as a gift.
Also, if you were forcibly pushed into the water, don’t worry, it it was a legitimate pushing, your body will find a way to shut out all the water and survive the drowning.]](http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/386013_10151014545771727_33885134_n.jpg)
[Image shows a little blonde white boy in an orange life jacket, holding a oar on a jetty over some some water.
Text reads, “We should ban life jackets & other floatation devices.
They only encourage risky behaviour. The only 100% effective way to prevent drowning is total abstinence from going in the water.
And if you do, by chance, find yourself struggling with drowning, then no life-saving or otherwise procedure or act should be allowed to be administered. You got yourself into this mess, you have to live with the consequences.
You should see drowning as a gift.
Also, if you were forcibly pushed into the water, don’t worry, it it was a legitimate pushing, your body will find a way to shut out all the water and survive the drowning.]
Over Two Decades, Abortion Rate Dropped For Women In Their 20s Because Of Contraception Access
By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 20, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Source
Between 1990 and 2008, pregnancy and abortion rates for women in their twenties dropped dramatically, a new study revealed today. Pregnancy rates fell by 18 percent, while abortion rates dropped by a third.
One of the biggest influencing factors in this decrease is the growing accessibility, use, and options for birth control. Contraceptive use is the best way to prevent abortions in the U.S. Over time, young women have gotten greater access to a larger number of pregnancy prevention methods. The study explains two main causes in the drop:
The introduction of new contraceptive methods and discontinuation of existing ones and]changes in the use of existing methods: the proportion of women using any method, the methods used, and how consistently and effectively they are used.
Indeed, only 70 percent of women (PDF) who started having sex between 1990 and 1994 used protection, whereas 84 percent did between 2005 and 2008:
And President Obama’s new policy that expands access to birth control will help ensure that more women can get contraception when they need it.
Currently, over half of pregnancies are unintended in the United States. Growing access to prevention methods will lead to a decrease in such unintended pregnancies. Other factors — including the trend toward getting married at an older age — also contribute to the pregnancy drop for 20-somethings.
This.
Can I spray-paint a hula hoop and come as a Nuvaring? I want a coalition of all forms of birth control following Romney around.
Photograph caption reads ‘Giant pack of birth control to follow Romney on campaign trail’. Photograph shows a group of people, both male and female, holding protest signs such as ‘I don’t want to be a father yet - Mitts of her birth control’. One person is dressed as a birth control pill packet.
Dr Dillner’s health dilemmas: do I need to change my contraception?
Recent studies have found that many women are over-confident in the effectiveness of their choice. So which methods are best?
People often think that their contraception is more reliable than it actually is, according to research published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (AJOG). A study of 4,000 American women found nearly half of those surveyed overestimated how effective the pill and condoms were at preventing pregnancy. A recent British survey by Marie Stopes of women who had unplanned pregnancies found a similar over-optimism about their effectiveness. So how safe is your choice of contraception?
Women who use no protection and have regular sex have an 85% chance of getting pregnant within a year (using the withdrawal method you are still subject to a 27% risk). If you are using condoms the figure is 15% for the male variety and 21% for the female type. A cervical cap has a 16% failure rate in a woman who has never had children but a 32% risk for women who have given birth. If you are on the pill you may think you are safer than you are: 8% of women get pregnant while taking it.
The solutionIf getting pregnant would be a disaster, then you need to be realistic in your choice of contraception. Failure rates are higher in real life than they are in studies. “In the real world women don’t take their pills perfectly,” says David L Eisenberg, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at St Louis School of Medicine in the United States and lead author of the AJOG paper. “They don’t take them close to the same time every day. They don’t know what to do when they miss a pill. It’s complicated: they should use another method or abstain until their next period to be really safe. Condoms have a high failure rate because you need to have a very motivated partner to use them and there is a lot of potential for mistakes.”
Studies show that women say they choose contraception based on how effective it is first, then how safe (how many side effects) and how convenient it is. But the most effective methods – long-acting reversible contraceptives which include implants, injections and intrauterine devices – are still under-used. Eisenberg recommends using these.
Contraceptive implants (a tiny rod under the skin) have a less than 0.1 in 100 risk of pregnancy over three years. A quarter of women stop using implants after one year, partly because of irregular bleeding but some may stop because they want to get pregnant. Intrauterine devices have a failure rate of less than two in 100 over 12 years but can cause bleeding and pelvic pain. Hormone injections (Depo-Provera) have a failure rate of less than 3% in the first year of use. They need to be repeated every 12 weeks so don’t forget to get the next injection.
If you’ve finished childbearing or don’t want children, then sterilisation works but still has a failure rate of one in 200 for women and one in 700 for men.
Why do so many women end up on the pill when it fails them?
Women overestimate the effectiveness of the Pill and condoms — the two most popular methods of birth control in this country — according to a new study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. After the study group of 4,100 women was counseled about other methods of birth control, such as IUDs, 71 percent chose to go on that or an implant. The findings suggest that many women choose the Pill because they don’t receive thorough counseling about their other birth control options or the true effectiveness of the Pill — which isn’t as great as pharmaceutical companies tell you it is.
This helps explain why the most popular methods of contraception in this country are the birth control Pill and condoms — if you don’t know all the information about all the methods of contraception available to you, why would you choose the one you know the least about? What many women don’t know about the Pill is that only if you take it exactly according to the manufacturer’s instructions, including at the same time every day, that your chances of getting pregnant are 0.3 percent. But for whatever reason — business or forgetfulness — many women don’t take the Pill exactly according to the instructions, bringing its real failure rate to a rather startling 9 percent, according to Dr. Nancy Stanwood, obstetrician/gynecologist and board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. That means that nearly one out of 10 women will get pregnant while taking the Pill over the course of a year.
