Fertility, Family Planning, and Women's Health An abundance of information on childbearing and women's health appears in a report released recently by the National Center for Health Statistics. The report, "Fertility, Family Planning, and Women's Health," includes data on topics such as contraception, sexual intercourse, infertility, pregnancy, and wanted and unwanted births. In addition to data on teenage sexual activity reported here earlier, the report states that the leading method of contraception remains female sterilization (10.7 million women) closely followed by the oral contraceptive pill (10.4 million women). The report also states that in 1995, 7.9 million women were relying on their partner to use a condom, compared with 5.1 million women in 1988 and 3.6 million women in 1982. These data, and other factors relating to family formation and reproductive health, are discussed in the NCHS' Vital and Health Statistics Series 23, No. 19 report. Data in the report are from Cycle 5 of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a periodic survey conducted by NCHS. Cycle 5 of the NSFG was conducted in 1995 and collected through in-person interviews with 10,847 women 15-44 years of age. Data Highlights: Fifty percent of women 15-19 years of age had ever had intercourse.
About 90 percent
of women 18-19 years of age reported that they had received formal instruction on sexually
transmitted diseases, safe sex to prevent HIV, and how to say no to sex. Eight percent of all women said that their first intercourse was not voluntary. Ten percent of births between 1990 and 1995 were unwanted by the mother at the time of conception, compared with 12 percent between 1984-88. For black women, the decrease in unwanted births between these two periods was particularly large -- from 29 to 21 percent. About 6.1 million women had impaired fecundity in 1995, compared with 4.9 million in 1988. Some of this increase is due to the aging of the baby boom generation. The percent with impaired fecundity was 8.4 in 1988 and 10.2 in 1995.
This page last reviewed
January 11, 2007
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