I was surprised to see on this chart on the situation of women in different countries that 72% of women in Canada are using modern contraception, and 73% of women in the US are.
This surprises me a bit, because, at least based on the news that makes it up here, the US seems to have more policies intended to make it difficult to get contraception and seems to lack some policies that we have that make it easier to get contraception. I would have assumed that, because of this, a slightly smaller percentage would be using contraception in the US.
The article doesn't define the concept of "women using modern contraception", so it's possible it might include male condoms being used by the woman's male partner. I haven't heard anything about making condoms difficult to access in the States, what I've been hearing is more about cost of and access to medical care, which would affect access to thinks like birth control pills, IUDs, diaphragms, etc.
It would be really interesting to see numbers on a) percentage of the population who wants to use more contraception than they're currently able to, b) proportion of unwanted pregnancies, and c) percentage of the population deliberately not using contraception (either because they're "trying" or because the particulars of their private life are not going to result in a pregnancy).
3 comments:
It's possible that this data predates the more recent US laws that make obtaining contraceptives more difficult. I know the source says 2012, but that's the publication date. There's lag time between data collection and publication.
Or it could be that those laws mostly affect women who weren't using contraceptives anyway, i.e. women without decent health insurance.
I would have thought the fact that lack of decent health insurance prevents some people from using contraceptives would have, in and of itself, made the US numbers lower than the Canadian numbers. The fact that it didn't is what made me think they might be including condoms.
Right, that makes more sense.
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