• The following is from an editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Two recent studies by the Centers for Disease Control show President Barack Obama's administration was right when it argued that increasing access to birth control makes economic and health sense.
One of the studies shows that 99 percent of women have used contraception, regardless of their background or religious affiliation. The other study shows that women increasingly are using emergency contraception as a means of controlling reproduction.
The studies suggest that liberals and conservatives can find something to like in this: Providing more access to birth control will reduce the use of the morning-after pill.
Conservatives should like that, since they generally argue that the morning-after pill does something that science and medical experts say it does not do, which is cause abortions. Emergency contraceptive pills work by preventing pregnancy after sex, not by terminating pregnancy.
Medical experts say that because contraception helps women avoid unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, it can reduce the need for abortions. Liberals should approve of less use of emergency contraception because it is more expensive, less reliable and harder to obtain than birth control used before or during sex.
The CDC that showed the high usage of contraception by women followed trends in birth control from 1982 to 2010.
Among other findings: Almost half of all pregnancies are unintended, and the use of long-acting reversible contraception, such as intrauterine devices and subdermal implants, is increasing.
The most common methods of birth control found in the study were female sterilization and oral contraceptive pills, followed by condoms and male sterilization. Pills were most commonly used by women 29 and younger, while female sterilization was most common among women 30 and older.
In the study of the use of emergency contraception from 2006 through 2010, 11 percent of women — one in nine women ages 15 to 44 — had used it.
Emergency contraception was used most frequently by Hispanic women and non-Hispanic white women between the ages of 20 and 24 who had never been married. Use increased with education, with 12 percent who used it having a bachelor's degree or higher. About half of those who used it said they did so because another method of birth control had failed. The other half said they used it because they had unprotected sex.
Women want to make their own decisions about when they will bear children and whose children they will bear. Making those choices harder will create heavier costs and social burdens in the future.