Use of Plan B increasing

By ACSH Staff — Feb 15, 2013
Emergency contraception isn t a secret anymore. An estimated 11 percent of sexually active girls and women aged 15 to 44 have used the morning-after pill at least once, a new federal report says. That comes to 5.8 million women, about half of whom said they used the pill because they had unprotected sex. The other half worried that their birth control method had failed.

Emergency contraception isn t a secret anymore. An estimated 11 percent of sexually active girls and women aged 15 to 44 have used the morning-after pill at least once, a new federal report says.

That comes to 5.8 million women, about half of whom said they used the pill because they had unprotected sex. The other half worried that their birth control method had failed.

Young women ages 20 to 24 were most likely to have used the pill about 1 in 4 had. And while one of the morning after pills is called Plan B, in some cases it seems to have become Plan A 17 percent of women who had used it said they d done so three or more times.

The data brief was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention s National Center for Health Statistics and is based on the National Survey of Family Growth. Data from 12,000 in-person interviews with women from 2006 to 2010 were used for the report.