Teen use of morning-after pill is climbing

A new report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control suggests the number of teens using the morning after pill has more than doubled compared to ten years ago.

Lindberg suspects that teens are actually using contraception more in recent years because the rate of teen pregnancy has been declining dramatically since the mid-2000s, yet there has not been a steep drop in the rate of teen sex.

It seems that teenagers are quite eager to have sex, if one were to look at the statistics, which show that the percentage of adolescent girls who use the morning-after pill is skyrocketing. Teens love: social media platforms so new they’re invisible to the naked eye of an adult; experimenting with mood-altering substances; cheap hair dye; trolling; and also the morning-after pill.

Figures within the report highlighted the role of contraception with girls who had not used it the first time they had sex, five times more likely to become pregnant by age 17 as girls who had used some kind of contraception.

However, National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy head program officer, Bill Albert, points out that this spike in emergency contraceptive use reveals that teens are clearly not good at contraceptives.

She attributed the other smaller shifts in favored birth control methods to a preference for longer-acting methods that don’t require taking a pill every day or preparing for each sexual encounter.

The morning-after pill reduces the chance of pregnancy after unprotected sex by 90% if used within the first 72 hours.

The report from the CDC was conducted from 2011 to 2013 and is based on surveys from 2,225 teenagers between the ages of 15-19. It typically costs $35 to $50.

As in previous studies, the number of teenage boys who say they’re sexually active outstrips girls, especially in the younger age group of 15-year-olds.

Given American women began using oral contraceptives in the late 1950s, it was not surprising the teen birth rate in 2013 was just 27 per 1,000 people.

This trend coincides with a steep decrease in teen birth rates, which have reached an all-time lowest in 2013, when there was only 3% out of all the young girls who became mothers.

The results showed a pretty large decline in the proportion of teens who had had sex by the time they turned 20.

Teen births, meanwhile, have plummeted about 57 percent over the last 30 years. From 2011 to 2013, 44 percent of teen girls and 47 percent of teen boys reported never having sex. “Probably not”, he said.