By Susaan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A new report has found that while the pill remains the contraceptive of choice for married American women, they are also much more likely than their global counterparts to opt for sterilization.
Fox News is reporting that the new study, conducted by theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention and based on interview with 7,300 women of childbearing age, found that one in four U.S. married women choose sterilization for birth control compared to less than 10 percent for most of the six other countries included in the study.
It also found that only 16 percent of married women say they use the pill, compared to 29 percent of married women in the United Kingdom and more than 40 percent in the Netherlands and France.
“The new report is the government’s first national data on contraception use in more than five years,” Fox reports. “It found that while the pill was the most used contraceptive by all women, sterilization was a close second. About 17 percent of women say they use the pill, and nearly the same proportion said they were sterilized.”
According to the report, most American women get their tubes tied after having children as a “don’t-have-to-worry-about-it-anymore measure. Younger and less educated women are also more prone to turn to sterilization.
Compared to the U.S., the sterilization rate in in European countries is much lower.
“It may be that surgical options are less acceptable to European women, and not as promoted by European doctors,” said Karin Ringheim, a senior policy adviser with the Population Reference Bureau, in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
The pill, sterilization and other forms of contraception are widely used by Catholic women in spite of Church teaching. In Humanae Vitae, Catholics are taught that “any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible.”
This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), the Pill, and all other such methods.
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