Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About...
Risk of Pregnancy
Will women stop using other forms
of birth control if emergency contraception is really easy
to get?
Emergency contraception
is designed to give you a second chance to prevent
pregnancy after sex
if your birth control fails (like the condom breaks), you didn’t
use contraception, or you were made to have sex against your will. And studies show
that, on average, women understand this.
To test this question, researchers gave women emergency
contraceptive pills (also known as "morning
after pills" or "day after pills") to keep at home
just in case they needed them. They found that the women who got emergency
contraception in advance
did not stop using their regular
kind of birth control. That’s not very surprising when you
consider that any contraceptive you use before or during sex is more
effective than emergency
contraceptive pills.
There are other reasons why it wouldn’t make sense for you to
use emergency contraception
as your main protection against pregnancy. Even though emergency
contraceptive pills have no serious or long-term side
effects, some women feel sick to their stomach or throw up after
taking them. You might also feel tired, get a headache, or have irregular
bleeding after taking
emergency contraceptive
pills. And emergency
contraception usually costs more
than most other birth control methods.
Some people have also asked if a man would be less likely to use a
condom if he knew a woman could keep from getting pregnant by using
emergency contraception
instead. Researchers studied this question, too, and found that the
answer on average is no. Click
here for more information.
A thorough and up-to-date academic review of the medical and social
science literature on emergency contraception, including studies about
how access to emergency contraceptive pills might affect use of regular
birth control, is available here
.