cause or effect?
May. 16th, 2006 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jenkFrom a WSJ article on the CDC's new guidelines "encouraging doctors of all specialties to ask women about their reproductive plans, and consider all treatments, procedures and medications in terms of what impact they would have on a possible pregnancy" comes this little factoid:
I also wonder about their definition of "unplanned". I've known people who "just did it once"; I've known birth control failures; I've known people to have "well, we decided to skip the birth control and see if it happened, but we weren't really TRYING". The first two are definitely unplanned; the last, well, isn't.
(More on the CDC guidelines at the Washington Post. While I like that my doc asks what I'm doing about birth control, I think that blocking women's access to treatments that are non-pregnancy-friendly is a mistake too.)
A study of 2001 birth data published this month in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health estimates that half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, with about a quarter of pregnancies in college graduates coming as a surprise.The implication is that college grads, being better educated, plan their lives more. I can't help but wonder if some of those college grads ARE college grads because they took action to not have a baby while they were in college.
I also wonder about their definition of "unplanned". I've known people who "just did it once"; I've known birth control failures; I've known people to have "well, we decided to skip the birth control and see if it happened, but we weren't really TRYING". The first two are definitely unplanned; the last, well, isn't.
(More on the CDC guidelines at the Washington Post. While I like that my doc asks what I'm doing about birth control, I think that blocking women's access to treatments that are non-pregnancy-friendly is a mistake too.)
