A leading academic, who will today speak at a conference in London today, claims the Pill is “outdated” and leads to more unwanted pregnancies costing the NHS £100 million a year.
James Trussell, of Princeton University, New Jersey, says that nearly one in 12 women who takes the Pill stand to become pregnant each year by missing occasional tablets.
He will tell the British Pregnancy Advisory Service conference in London today that increased access to the “morning after” pill would not have significant effect on rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortions.
Speakers at the conference will say that women should use longer-lasting methods such as hormonal implants or intrauterine devices (IUDs) that can be “fitted and forgotten”, but later removed when/if the women wants to have a child.
The government would like to encourage more women to use long-acting methods, and guidance has suggested that if 7 percent of women currently using the pill switched to a longer-acting method, then it would prevent 73,000 unintended pregnancies, which would save the NHS £100 million a year,
But Professor Trussell said that few GPs offered long-acting reversible contraceptives or were trained at fitting them, so most women ended up using the Pill by default.
“The Pill is an outdated method because it does not work well enough,” he added. “It is very difficult for ordinary women to take a pill every single day. The beauty of the implant or the IUD is that you can forget about them.”
Studies have shown that women miss three times as many pills as they commonly say they do. Computerised pill packs were used to show that although about half of women said they did not miss any pills, less than a third actually did.
