United States: A new study also shows that women in states that have adopted the highest level of abstinence in accessing abortions have also been going less for prescription birth control.
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About a dozen states where abortion is nearly or entirely prohibited witnessed a decrease in the number of monthly prescriptions of oral contraceptives and emergency contraceptive pills during the second half of 2022 compared to pre-Dobbs decision numbers, as indicated in the study released on Wednesday by the JAMA Network Open medical journal.
The researchers mentioned the closure of some family planning clinics, together with the general public’s confusion about the options that are still legal after the June 2022 Dobbs decision, as the reasons behind such a scenario.
According to Dr. Michael Belmonte, an Ob-Gyn and fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists focused on complex family planning, “It’s really important to recognize that these issues all fall under the scope of reproductive health care,” as CNN Health reported.
Belmonte, who was not involved in the study, said, “When something touches on abortion care, that will ultimately have ripple effects for miscarriage care, for contraception and emergency contraception, and, quite frankly, access to general medical health care for many women across the United States.”
More about the study
As part of a new survey, the authors monitored the tendencies of monthly rates for birth control prescriptions from March to November 2021, before the leak of the Dobbs decision, and after the decision from July 2022 to October 2023.
They compared the rates in a group of 12 states with legislation that adopted policies regarding abortion with the highest restrictiveness to a group of 14 states with more or less constant policies.
While the decision to use birth control pills has been declining in the US generically, and other studies show that the use of IUDs, the more effective type of birth control, has been increasing for the past decades, the prescription fill rate decreased about 4 percent more than expected in states with the most restrictive laws in the post-Dobbs period according to the study, as CNN Health reported.
Levels in states with bans on abortion declined more steeply for prescriptions for emergency contraception – including levonorgestrel, such as Plan B, and ulipristal, such as Ella.
In the case of accessibility to abortion pills prior to Dobbs, both categories of states – those that have implemented bans and those where policies remained stable – had similar prescription fill rates early on and also had similar, and temporary, increases post-Dobbs.
However, by the second half of 2023, the prescription rate of emergency contraception in the states that have banned abortions was below half of what it used to be before the Dobbs decision, which was approximately 20 fills per 100000 women of childbearing age each month and by the end of the study it was eight fills per 100000 women of childbearing age.
Where policies on abortions remained unchanged in the particular states, the rate even increased in the same period – from 20 to 21.
The study authors added, “These findings suggest that efforts to protect and improve access to oral contraceptives are needed, especially for emergency contraceptives in states where abortion is most strongly restricted,” as CNN Health reported.