I ran across some interesting statistics on the number of unplanned pregnancies in the United States.
The good news is that the number of teen pregnancies are down. According to Bill Albert, the director of the National Campaign to prevent teen pregnancy the rate of unplanned pregnancies fell 36 percent, which is the lowest it has been in a long time.

While the number of teen pregnancies in on the decline, the number of unplanned pregnancies among young women is not. The definition of unplanned (they used unwanted but I don’t like that description) pregnancies in this case is pretty self explanatory, meaning pregnancies that were unintended or ill-timed.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, there is a rise among the number of unplanned pregnancies in young women. For women who are 25-29 years old, the number increased from 66 to 71 pregnancies per 1,000 women and for women who are 30-34 years old, the number of unplanned pregnancies rose from 38 to 44 per 1,000 women. Basically that boils down to one in three pregnancies being unplanned. Both the Guttmacher Institute and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy hypothesize that the majority of unplanned pregnancies are amongst unmarried women but they do not have the statistics to prove that.

So this information has both organizations wondering why the rate of unplanned pregnancies is up amongst young women. In focus groups conducted among the country recently with college and non-college educated twenty somethings, found that while many women are not actively pursuing to become pregnant, they are knowingly taking their chances at becoming pregnancy with “hit and miss” birth control. While young women in the focus groups may not intend to become pregnant, becoming pregnant unexpectedly wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. One twenty two year old participant summed up that feeling:

"Well, we were planning on getting married, and planning to save for a house, so Myron and I are very committed to each other, so we just were -- I don't know. If we were to get pregnant it wouldn't be a big deal. Or it wouldn't be something unwanted or unplanned. And if we didn't [get pregnant] it wasn't a big deal either."

Source


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