Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.
This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.
(And those women who said they did use birth control were probably often talking about nothing but a condom!)
I think we need to, as far as we can, dissociate birth control from sex. As it is, people think of the decision to go on birth control as a preparation for sex; which makes young women hesitant about starting birth control, or about admitting it. (That's probably why so many young women say they're on the pill for medical reasons.) Now, the average age of first sexual intercourse in the U.S. is sixteen. Not a few girls do it at 12 or 13. Every woman should go on birth control by the age of 14 at the latest. As a precautionary measure. I would advise a public relations campaign aimed at parents. Parents don't like to admit their daughters will have sex--well, frame it as a medical issue, as was done more or less successfully with the HPV vaccine. That way, the ones who want to have sex will do it without being so neurotic about it and without getting pregnant, and the ones who don't won't be harmed.
