Family planning perspectives
-
Comparative Study
Private physicians and the provision of contraceptives to adolescents.
Data from a national sample of private physicians show that 86 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists, general practitioners and pediatricians are willing to prescribe contraceptive methods to adolescent women. However, only 59 percent are willing to serve unmarried minors without parental consent. The obstetrician-gynecologists are more likely to provide contraceptives than the other two specialists, and are likely to have fewer policy restrictions. ⋯ Ninety percent of private physicians who prescribe contraceptives for adolescent women will prescribe the pill, but smaller proportions will make the diaphragm or IUD available (61 and 23 percent, respectively). Among the physicians surveyed, the average fee that an adolescent would have to pay for an initial contraceptive visit, including laboratory tests, is $37. Of those who accept teenage contraceptive patients, only 53 percent will accept Medicaid reimbursement and only one percent indicate that they will instead provide free services to adolescents who cannot afford to pay the fee.
-
A relatively new multivariate life-table technique has permitted the effect of socioeconomic characteristics on first-year contraceptive failure rates to be determined to a greater degree of precision than was possible in the past. This technique is employed in this article to determine the one-year rates of contraceptive discontinuation among currently married U. S. women, using data from the 1973 and 1976 National Surveys of Family Growth (NSFG). ⋯ Finally, the subgroups of women who are most likely to stop using a particular method also are generally the groups that are most likely to experience contraceptive failures, while those that are least likely to discontinue use are also least likely to fail. Two exceptions are women who rely on rhythm and those who use the pill. The former experience relatively high rates of failure but are relatively less likely to stop using the method, and the latter have relatively high rates of discontinuation despite a low rate of failure.
-
An analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) finds that 82 percent of sexually active teenage mothers were using contraceptives in the year following the birth of their first child; the majority of those who practiced contraception used the pill. The proportion of black teenagers using no method of birth control was higher than that for white teenagers, and it increased over the course of the year. Rates of nonuse were particularly high among black women younger than 18, only 68 percent of whom practiced contraception (compared with 85 percent of whites the same age). ⋯ Blacks constituted the majority of women who were not married at the time of first birth, and of all marital subgroups, single blacks had the highest rate of nonuse (29 percent). The probability of a pregnancy during the year following a first birth for all teenage mothers was 17 percent. Pregnancy rates among women with incomes less than 150 percent of poverty level were nearly twice as high as rates among women who had incomes above that level--21 percent vs. 11 percent.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
-
In the first 13 years after the federal government initiated support for family planning clinic services, there was a fivefold increase in the number of U. S. women obtaining these services from organized programs, from about 860,000 in 1968 to 4.6 million in 1981. This increase was due to the growth in the number of service providers and in the average number of clients served by each agency. ⋯ Thus, about 58 percent of the 9.5 million low-income women who were exposed to the risk of having an unintended pregnancy in 1981 made a contraceptive visit in that year; 39 percent went to clinics and 19 percent visited private physicians. Five million women 19 years of age or younger were at risk of unintended pregnancy in 1981; of these, 2.9 million (57 percent) obtained medically supervised family planning services--30 percent from organized programs and 27 percent from private physicians. Family planning clinic patients obtained contraceptive care from a variety of public and private health agencies in 1981.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)