Teens’ interest in long-lasting birth control soars after overturning of Roe
Sixteen-year-old Adismarys Abreu had been discussing a long-lasting birth control implant with her mother for about a year as a potential solution to increasing menstrual pain.
Then Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Adismarys joined the throng of teens rushing to their doctors as states began to ban or severely limit abortion.
“I’m definitely not ready to be pregnant,” said Adismarys, who had Nexplanon — a reversible, matchsticksized contraceptive — implanted in her arm in August. Her home state of Florida bans most abortions after 15 weeks, and not having that option is “such a scary thought,” she said.
Experts say the U. S. Supreme Court’s June ruling appears to be accelerating a trend of increased birth control use among teens, including long-acting reversible forms like intrauterine devices and implants. Appointments have surged and Planned Parenthood has been flooded with questions as doctors report demand even among teens who aren’t sexually active.
Some patients are especially fearful because the new abortion laws in several states don’t include exceptions for sexual assault.
“Please, I need some birth control in case I get raped,” patients tell Dr. Judith Simms-Cendan, a pediatric-adolescent gynecologist in Miami, where state law does not provide exceptions for rape or incest after 15 weeks.
Dr. Simms-Cendan, the president-elect of the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, said parents who might have been hesitant in the past now want to discuss birth control.
“It’s a sea change of, ‘I don’t have room to play. We have got to get my child on something,’” she said.
Teens already were shifting to more effective longacting forms of birth control, which have similar or even lower failure rates than sterilization, said Laura Lindberg, a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Public Health in New Jersey. Her research found the number of 15- to 19-year-olds using those methods rose to 15% during the period 2015 to 2019, up from 3% during the 2006 to 2010 period.
No national data is available for the months since Roe was overturned, said Ms. Lindberg, who previously worked for nearly two decades at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that backs abortion rights.
But she said “major ripple effects” have to be expected from the loss of abortion access and noted that it wouldn’t be the first time politics have led to a shift in birth control usage.
In the weeks after former President Donald Trump’s election, as women raised concerns online that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed, demand for longacting birth control rose by nearly 22% across all age groups, according to a 2019 research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
In Ohio, where a judge this month blocked a ban on virtually all abortions, patients — both male and female — now listen with rapt attention to the contraception talk that Dr. Peggy Stager has long made a part of routine appointments at her pediatric practice in Cleveland.
Dr. Stager said her practice’s dedicated spots for insertion of the Nexplanon implant are consistently filled, and requests for contraceptive refills have increased 30% to 40% since Roe was overturned. Recently, she talked to a college-bound student who wasn’t sexually active but decided to get an IUD. “She was real clear: ‘I want to have a great four years without any worry,’” recalled Dr. Stager, who is the chair of the section on adolescent health at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And that’s a change.”
In Missouri, among the first states in the country with a trigger law in effect to ban abortions at any point in pregnancy, Dr. David Eisenberg also has seen a similar sense of urgency from college-bound teens to choose the most effective option.
“Fear is an amazing motivator,” said Dr. Eisenberg, an associate professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who performs abortions in neighboring Illinois. “They understand the consequence of a contraceptive failure might mean they become a parent because they might not be able to access an abortion.”