Sharon Camp, President and Ceo of the Guttmacher Institute, said that this increase indicated an urgent need to make contraceptives more widely available:
"our stalled progress should be an urgent message to policymakers that we need to do more to increase access to contraceptive services to prevent unintended pregnancy, while ensuring access to abortion".This sentiment was echoed in a press release by Planned Parenthood, one of the world's major abortion providers, which said that:
"[t]he first step we can take as a nation is to increase access to affordable contraception".However, according to the report 54% of the women who had abortions had used contraception in the month that they became pregnant and only 8% of women had never used any form of contraception.
This is an all too familiar script. In the UK we know that abortion rates for under-16s are higher now than when the British government's strategy to cut abortion rates was introduced in 1999. A major focus of that strategy was to inform children about contraception and to make contraception easily available to school children. Professor David Paton of Nottingham University has studied in detail the depth of the strategy's failure.
That contraception does not prevent either unintended pregnancies or abortion is evident from the Guttmacher report. As I blogged earlier this month, there is growing evidence of the close association between contraception and abortion. Abortion follows in the wake of contraception. The provision of contraception not only fails to prevent unplanned pregnancies but results in unborn children being victimised to death as the unwelcome consequences of so-called contraceptive failure.
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