According to the latest study, the women who opt for long term birth control make a better decision than those who choose methods that require daily or monthly remembering.
This research shows that the women who use patches, pills or vaginal rings have 20 times higher chances of getting pregnant than the women who opt for IUD s or implants under the skin.
The researchers say that they were surprised by the large differences between the effectiveness of the methods. The latest study is considered to be the largest one ever made. It took into consideration a time period of three years and it worked with a high number of women with IUDs.
The majority of the previous studies were based on women’s recall regarding the effectiveness of their birth control.
Unplanned pregnancies
There are about 6 million of pregnancies in the U. S. per year and about 3 million of these are unplanned.
Half of these occur because of the inconsistent or incorrect use of birth control methods.
The researchers also say that the failure rate is higher than in case of other developed countries where IUDs are a lot more commonly used.
Statistics
In this study, the specialists worked with 5,800 women who were at risk of having an unplanned pregnancy. 1,500 of these women used contraceptive pills, vaginal rings or patches and 176 women opted for inject able birth control methods.
During this study, there were 344 unplanned pregnancies. 156 of them occurred because of contraceptive failure such as the inconsistent or improper use of the methods and 178 occurred because of other reasons, such as not using contraceptives.
Women with birth control pills, vaginal rings and patches experienced the higher failure rate. 133 of the women who opted for these methods got pregnant. As a result the failure rate is of 4.5%. 21 women got pregnant while they were using an IUD and 2 women got pregnant although they used inject able birth control methods.
Age related patterns
The truth is that the birth control is a major factor, but the age of women also had a role to play. According to the findings, the women under 21 who used only the pill, vaginal rings or patches were twice as likely to get pregnant than the older women. The specialists say that this is because the younger women are more likely to forget to take their pills or to change the ring or the patch.
