Back in June when the news of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case hit, there was a lot of talk about the scope of this ruling on women's lives. The debate over whether or not all companies, regardless of who owns them, should be required to pay for insurance coverage of contraception has died down a bit since then, but a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows just how important birth control is to the lives of many American women.
From 2011 to 2013, 61.7 percent of American women aged 15 to 44 were currently using contraception, according to the CDC. Unsurprisingly, the most popular form of birth control among women was the pill at 16 percent. However, the second most popular form of contraception, and a shockingly close second I might add, was female sterilization at 15.5 percent. In fact, nearly one in three women aged 35 to 44 underwent female sterilization, compared to less than 1 percent of women aged 15 to 24.
Let's think about this. About a third of middle-aged women undergo this procedure that permanently prevents you from getting pregnant. That's pretty astounding, isn't it?
However, these statistics might not actually be as surprising as you think. "Consider the fact that the majority of women in this country have had the number of children they want to have by mid-twenties to thirty or so — and they still have the capacity to get pregnant until they are 50 years old," Dr. Vanessa Cullins, the vice president of external medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told TIME. Some women who don't want children and also don't want to deal with the hassle of temporary birth control methods see female sterilization as a good option.
The third and fourth most popular forms of birth control were male condoms at 9.4 percent and long-acting reversible contraceptives at 7.2 percent, respectively. One type of long-acting reversible contraception of note is the IUD, which is actually the most effective type of birth control with failure rates under 1 percent. Unsurprisingly, the IUD is gaining popularity among women. The rate of use among women almost doubled from 3.8 percent in 2006 to 2010 to 7.2 percent in 2011 to 2013. The other forms of birth control in this report saw slight declines since 2010.
It's safe to say that when the next CDC report on birth control comes out, these results may look a lot different.
