Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
A new study on the alleged health benefits of contraception, which was commissioned by Planned Parenthood with the hopes of convincing lawmakers not to strip them of taxpayer funding, has been found to be over-long on hype and far too short on facts.
Writing for National Review, Michael J. New, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan–Dearborn and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Washington, D.C., the new study was carried out by the liberal think tank Child Trends which makes “outlandish claims” about the purported health benefits of contraception.
“The study claims that if all women of childbearing age could access a complete range of contraception methods, both the unintended-pregnancy rate and the abortion rate would fall by more than 60 percent, saving Americans over $12 billion a year,” New reports.
It’s not surprising that the study has already received uncritical coverage from a number of mainstream media outlets such as Time and Yahoo Health, even though the study has a number of serious methodological problems.
For example, the authors extrapolate from a 2015 study in which 20 Planned Parenthood clinics across the United States improved their counseling and offered women access to a wider range of contraceptive methods. The women who went to these particular clinics were likely to switch from condoms to more reliable forms of contraception such as the pill and Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs). The authors of the 2015 study found some short-term evidence that the women who sought contraception at these clinics had lower unintended- pregnancy rates than women in a control group.
“However, the authors of the new Child Trends study simply assume that the greater use of more reliable of contraceptives will automatically reduce the unintended-pregnancy rate,” New explains.
This assumption is specious, at best. “They overlook the possibility that many women who use contraceptives do not do so consistently. They also fail to consider the way in which access to more reliable forms of contraceptives might affect the frequency of sexual activity. Finally, they ignore the fact that LARCs — which are thought to be the most reliable form of contraception — have a high discontinuance rate.”
In other words, just because women have access to more reliable methods of contraception doesn’t mean they’ll use these methods consistently enough to bring about such a dramatic decrease in unintended-pregnancy rates.
More importantly, he continues, the ability of any public-policy intervention to increase contraception use is limited at best. He cites research from the Guttmacher Institute, which was the research arm of Planned Parenthood until 2007, which found that only a small percentage of sexually active women forgo contraception due to cost or lack of availability.
“The trends in the United States are instructive. By many measures, contraceptive use has increased since the early 1980s,” New writes. “However, the unintended-pregnancy rate today is almost exactly where it was in 1981. The 50 percent reduction in the U.S. abortion rate since 1980 is not due to contraception. It is due to the fact that a higher percentage of women with unintended pregnancies are carrying them to term. Guttmacher statistics show that almost 54 percent of unintended pregnancies were aborted in 1981; that percentage fell to 40 percent by 2008.”
These facts are significant, New writes, as is the fact that that Planned Parenthood, which is on the brink of losing its taxpayer funding, would commission Child Trends to carry out the study rather than their research pal, the Guttmacher Institute.
As New suggests: “The possibility that Guttmacher might have declined to carry out such an analysis suggests that even an aggressively pro-contraception think tank would rightfully be wary of these outlandish claims.”
At any rate, this latest attempt by a desperate Planned Parenthood to convince the public that they should keep their taxpayer funding has fallen embarrassingly short of its goal.
