Who Are We - Contraceptive Patterns

The contraceptive practices of women in the childbearing years — ages 15 to 44 — is another factor that affects the nation's overall fertility rate. The graphic above profiles these practices for a single year, 1995.

Data are shown for three age groups and for the entire childbearing group of women in 1995, 60.2 million in that year, roughly in equal distribution, but skewed toward the oldest age group:

Women 15-24:	18.00 million	29.9%
Women 25-34:	20.76 million	34.5
Women 35-44:	21.44 million	35.4

Among those who are classified as sterile, nearly 94% are surgically sterile; the rest are sterile because of congenital conditions, illness, accidents, or because the male is sterile for non-reported reasons. Fifty-seven percent of the oldest age group are classified as sterile (12.2 million women), and nearly 30% of all women (17.9 million).

The two smallest groups (together 8.6% of childbearing age women), are either pregnant or postpartum or reported that they were attempting to become pregnant — a group of 5.2 million women.

Slightly more than 22% of women in these age groups were not using contraceptives of any kind. Of these, nearly half (48.9% or 6.6 million) reported never having had intercourse. 44.4% of the 15-24 year old women reported that they did not use contraceptives; and of these, 69.4% had never had intercourse.

Nearly 39.7% of all women of childbearing age reported using non-surgical forms of contraception — 23.9 million women. Forty-five percent of the youngest and 49% of the middle age group reported such practice. The form of non-surgical contraception used by all age groups combined is shown in the following pie chart:

Contraceptives Used -All Women

The Pill had the largest share of such contraceptives (43.6%) followed by condoms (33%), and by "Other methods" (9.8%). "Other methods" includes implants, injectables, morning-after pills, suppositories, Today^TM sponge, and less frequently used methods.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001. 121^st ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001, Table 87, p. 69. The source indicates that the data were developed by the National Center for Health Statistics in a special tabulation from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth.