American women are still spurning the most effective methods of birth control in favor of the pill and sterilization, government researchers said Tuesday.
But women almost universally use birth control of some sort, with 60 percent of women currently using contraception and 99 percent of women who have ever had sex having used it at some point, the team from the National Center for Health Statistics found.
And the number of women using the most reliable methods — intrauterine devices, or IUDs, or implantable or injectable hormones — doubled to nearly 12 percent between 2006 and 2013, the survey found.
The team at NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used surveys of more than 10,000 men and women taken between 2011 and 2013.
"Among women currently using contraception, the most commonly used methods were the pill (25.9 percent, or 9.7 million women), female sterilization (25.1 percent, or 9.4 million women), the male condom (15.3 percent, or 5.8 million women), and long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) — intrauterine devices or contraceptive implants (11.6 percent, or 4.4 million women)," they wrote.
"The percentage of all women aged 15–44 using LARC increased from 3.8 percent to 7.2 percent between 2006–2010 and 2011–2013," the survey added.
And nearly 5 percent said they used withdrawal as a method even though it's extremely ineffective.
The CDC’s been pushing for more women to use implants or IUDs, but women are reluctant to embrace them. Programs that pay for such methods for women have been successful, but have trouble getting funding.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act requires that health insurers pay for a woman’s contraception, but the Supreme Court continues to hear legal challenges to the requirement.
The latest challenge was accepted earlier this month.
