Can emergency contraception help to reduce teen pregnancy?
Teen pregnancy rates in the United States have been declining since the early 1990s—a decline primarily attributable to more effective contraceptive practice, not to a decline in sexual activity. At the same time, however, US teen pregnancy rates remain persistently higher than those in most developed countries. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual health policy and research organization, approximately 750,000 teenagers annually still become pregnant, with 34% of these pregnancies ending in abortion.1 Most of the pregnancies are unplanned.2,3 By age 17, approximately half of adolescents are sexually active. Most teens are unlikely to use contraception regularly, and many do not use it at all. Statistics show that a sexually active teen has a 90% chance of becoming pregnant within a year if she is not using any form of contraception. While public education efforts have improved the rate of contraceptive use, 22% of teenage girls do not use any form of
