Furthermore, efforts to expand access to contraception have proven to be a poor strategy for lowering either the unintended-pregnancy rate or the abortion rate. There are multiple reasons. First, contraceptives encourage sexual risk-taking and have a failure rate. The Guttmacher Institute’s own data show that 50 percent of all women seeking abortions were using some form of contraception the month that they became pregnant. Furthermore, even though data from the Centers for Disease Control indicate that contraceptive use has increased since the early 1980s, there has not been a consistent, durable decline in the unintended-pregnancy rate since that time.

Additionally, multiple studies show that few sexually active women have difficulty accessing contraceptives. In a Guttmacher Institute study in 2002, approximately 10,000 women were surveyed who had obtained abortions. Of those not using contraception, only 12 percent cited cost or availability as reasons. More common reasons for not using contraception included wanting to show trust in a partner and a willingness to risk getting pregnant. Similarly in 2012, a CDC study of nearly 5,000 teenage girls who gave birth also found that only a small percentage had difficulty accessing contraception.

[This has always been more of a political gambit for conservatives in the abortion debate more than a medically supported argument. They have been accused for decades of trying to “punish women with a baby,” and so they have adopted support for OTC birth control to negate that argument. New is correct, though; we have tons of data that shows the percentage of unintended pregnancies from a lack of access to birth control to be microscopically small. The OTC policy is not necessary, but it’s politically valuable, so I suspect that “future Republican administrations” will opt to keep it in place. — Ed]