Research Priorities for Preventing Unintended Pregnancy: Moving Beyond Emergency Contraceptive Pills

摘要

Having personally devoted considerable time and energy to efforts to increase women's access to emergency contraception, we have been disappointed that none of the interventions designed to increase the use of emergency contraceptive pills has significantly reduced rates of unintended pregnancy. A constructive reaction to this disappointment requires that we identify new directions and approaches to reducing rates of unintended pregnancy that merit increased research attention. Because contraceptives are used to reduce the risk of "unintended" pregnancy we must first examine how pregnancy intentions are assessed. Common measurements and conceptualizations of unintended pregnancy have significant limitations. For example, a third of pregnancies attributed to "contraceptive failures" in the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth could be classified as "intended." And although up to a third of women attending urgent care clinics are ambivalent about getting pregnant,5 researchers and policymakers often dichotomize pregnancy intentions, assigning them to categories that are not meaningful to many women.