Professor Michael J. New has a new article out claiming that the Food and Drug Administration's decision to give a single oral contraception formula over-the-counter status will not lower abortion rates. With all due respect, not only is the overall claim suspect, as I will explain later, but he also misrepresents the data which in actuality undermines his very thesis.
New writes that "the Guttmacher Institute’s own data show that 50 percent of all women seeking abortions were using some form of contraception the month that they became pregnant," claiming this as evidence that "contraceptives encourage sexual risk-taking and have a failure rate."
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New misses the minutiae of that data, which I have written about extensively. Just 13% of abortion recipients in this study reported using oral contraception, which has a success rate of more than 99%, and only 2.6% reported using long-acting reversible contraception, such as an IUD or the patch, which boasts even higher success rates.
Compare that to the more than a quarter of study respondents who used condoms, which are 98% successful with perfect use, and the 7.4% who used withdrawal, a "birth control" method so ineffective it cannot even accurately be described as such. (About 1 in 5 couples who rely on pulling out will conceive within a year).
So this study shows that fewer than one in seven patients in the study were using oral contraception, a far cry from the 50% New posits in his piece.
New cites a second Guttmacher study finding that "only 12 percent [of abortion recipients] cited cost or availability as reasons" for not using contraception as evidence that "few sexually active women have difficulty accessing contraceptives." But 14.6% of women in this study said they "never got around to getting a [contraception method]," another 7% said their partners didn't want to use a method, and 25.6% said that they didn't expect to have sex at the time. Seeing as this study is about all contraception methods (not just birth control pills), these explanations, which comprise almost half of all the women who got abortions in this 2002 study, presumably and primarily apply to condoms or withdrawal. OTC oral contraception puts the onus on the woman, who then is only responsible for going to the pharmacy to pick up the pill once a month at most.
Furthermore, this study notes that "Pill users were underrepresented among women having abortions, whereas women using condoms and withdrawal were overrepresented. These patterns reflect the fact that women using oral contraceptives are more successful in avoiding accidental pregnancy than are those who rely on barrier or nonprescription methods."
New once again seems to conflate the broad category of "contraception" with the Pill, saying "a CDC study of nearly 5,000 teenage girls who gave birth also found that only a small percentage had difficulty accessing contraception." But only a fifth of the girls in the study reported using highly effective contraception methods, including oral contraception, meaning that perhaps the study respondents were noting that they didn't have "difficulty accessing" condoms or other less effective birth control. Furthermore, the near quarter of respondents who said they didn't use birth control because their "partner did not want to use contraception" were likely talking about condoms because those are what historically have been available for teenagers.
Let's look at some newer data that New doesn't include, namely from 2017, the nadir of the abortion rate since the Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade. From 2014 to 2017, coinciding with the launch of the contraception mandate, the abortion rate fell by 8%, primarily due to a 14% decline in the West, including a 16% decline in California.
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But even the contraception mandate's downward pressure on the abortion rate was more likely due to the massive uptick in insured women adopting IUDs. Obamacare didn't solve the central barrier for the women most at risk of unwanted pregnancies: Lacking easy access or availability to see a physician or insurance coverage altogether.
The FDA's decision was long overdue, but hopefully portends moving more formulations over the counter and thus restoring the laws of supply, demand, and sanity to at least one market of Big Pharma. Women will continue to make wiser choices for their bodies before conceiving an unwanted pregnancy, if only the government gets out of the way.