Study Finds Condom Use Is Increasing
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: May 26, 2010 NY Times
Women and their partners in the United States are increasingly using male condoms when they have premarital sex for the first time, which may explain why teenage birth rates have declined in recent decades, according to a new government survey of contraceptive methods.
The proportion of women who used some form of contraceptive the first time they had premarital sex rose to 84 percent in the survey compared with 55 percent before 1985. Most of the increase came from the growing use of a male condom, used by 72 percent of women at first intercourse compared with 34 percent before 1985.
Contraceptive use varied greatly by the education level of parents. About 84 percent of women whose mother had a college education used contraception the first time they had sex compared with 53 percent of women whose mothers did not finish high school.
The numbers come from the National Survey of Family Growth , which is conducted every six to seven years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most recent survey was carried out from 2006 to 2008, and its results were released for the first time Wednesday.
The survey has long been used to help answer why half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, a far higher proportion than is found in many other industrialized countries. One clear reason is the relatively high share of unprotected sex that occurs in the United States.
“There are some pieces of good news in here,” said Bill Mosher, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, “but what struck me was how persistent some of these patterns are. And that they’re different from some other countries’.”
About 40 percent of births in the United States in recent years are to unmarried women. In addition to about 4 million births that occur annually in the United States, there are 1.2 million abortions and an estimated 1 million miscarriages and stillbirths.
Eleven percent of sexually active unmarried women who are not looking to become pregnant do not use contraceptives, the survey found, with a far higher share of black women failing to use contraceptives than white, Hispanic or Asian women.
Among women who did not use a contraceptive before an unintended pregnancy, the most common reason they gave was that they did not think they could get pregnant.
Religious teachings forbidding contraceptives are almost universally ignored in the United States, since 99 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 who had sex at least once have used some form of contraception. The most popular method in the United States is the pill, used by 10.7 million women between the ages of 15 and 44, closely followed by sterilization, used by 10.3 million women.
The typical pattern among women is to rely on a male condom at first intercourse, the pill to delay birth and sterilization once a woman has had all the children she wants. Indeed, 54 percent of sexually active teenage women who used contraception chose the pill compared with just 11 percent of women over the age of 40.
The share who had ever used a contraceptive patch rose to 10 percent from 1 percent in 2002, but that share is likely to decline since warnings about risks caused a drop in its popularity.
The IUD is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, increasing to 6 percent of those who use contraceptives from 2 percent in 2002. Even among teenagers, nearly 4 percent of those who use contraceptives chose an IUD. There are now more than two million IUD users in this country.
Black and Hispanic men are far less likely to have had a vasectomy than white men, the survey said.
In European countries with far lower birth and abortion rates, women are much more likely to use the pill or an IUD and much less likely to use sterilization than women in the United States.
