[R]esearchers at Washington University in Saint Louis provided free contraception to thousands of local women through the CHOICE Contraceptive Project. They were given their choice of method after being informed of effectiveness rates, potential side effects and the risks and benefits of each. Of the 1,404 teens in the NEJM study spanning 2007 to 2011, 74 percent chose long-acting methods — more than 16 times the reported rate of usage for U.S. teenage women.
The results were pretty stark. Teens in the CHOICE program, when compared to the national average, were five times less likely to get pregnant or give birth, and they were about four times less likely to have an abortion.
The average annual birth rate in the CHOICE group — in which three-quarters used a long-acting contraceptive — was 19.4 per 1,000 teens, which was 36 percent lower than the CDC’s 2015 goal of 30.3 per 1,000 teens. And two-thirds of teens in the CHOICE program who chose a long-acting method were still using it after two years, much better than the rate for those using a different method (one-third).
The NEJM study also comes just months after Colorado reported a state health initiative reduced the teen birth rate by 40 percent over five years by providing IUDs and other implantable devices to low-income women. That program was funded by an anonymous donor, so it’s not the kind of thing that could be easily recreated across the country. Notably, though, the Affordable Care Act requires most health plans to provide no-cost birth control, which is at the heart of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and still-pending religious challenges to the law’s contraceptive coverage mandate.
No, there is no war on women….
As the Islamic State marched through Iraq and Syria this summer, its refrain was “convert or die.” For many, refusal to swear fealty to the Islamic State and adopt its violent, repressive ideology meant a bullet to the head.
But some women and children imprisoned by the Islamic State who refuse to convert have been dealt a fate some might consider worse than death.
By the end of August, the Islamic State had abducted up to 2,500 Iraqi civilians, most of them women and children, according to a new United Nations report based on more than 450 interviews with witnesses.
Some have been awarded to fighters, others sold as slaves in markets in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.
There were several reports of an office in Mosul where women and girls are tagged with a price and offered for sale to buyers.
Some women have reportedly been sold to young men to entice them into fighting for the Islamic State
