United States: More and more youth are now saying they shouldn’t have kids because we’ve overturned Roe v. Wade, and in doing so, did away with the constitutional right to abortion, a new survey suggests.
Increase in Sterilization
The number of youths choosing a non-reversible sterilization procedure jumped all of a sudden all over the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 2022 to overthrow the Roe v. Wade case said the researchers in the JAMA Health Forum journal published on April 12, as reported by HealthDay.
Teenagers, especially young girls, have the increased twice the risk to undergo tubal sterilizations than the relative rise among male youth for vasectomies, researchers discovered.
Policy Impact on Contraceptive Choices
“The major difference in patterns of these two procedures likely reflects the fact that young women are overwhelmingly responsible for preventing pregnancy and disproportionately experience the health, social and economic consequences of abortion bans,” while the lead researcher Jacqueline Ellison was speaking. She’s an assistant health policy and management professor at the University of Pittsburg School of Public Health.
This is the first study to ascertain from the perspective of young adults the effect of Dobbs on the decisions towards permanent contraception, the study authors said.
Sharp Rise in Sterilization Rates
The rates of permanent sterilization for the age group of 18 to 30 years were slowly escalating by 2.8 per 100,000 person-months for women and 1 per 100,000 person-months for men, according to medical records data from academic medical centers.
However, after the Supreme Court ruling, the number suddenly spiked by 58 procedures per 100,000 person-months for women and 27 for men, according to the results.
“The abrupt increase in permanent contraception rates may indicate a policy-induced change in contraceptive preferences,” the research team concluded in a university news release. “Dobbs may have also increased a sense of urgency among individuals who were interested in permanent contraception before the decision.”
Complexities and Cost Factors
The trend that had women going for tubal sterilization grew more extensive, yet that did not translate to more men signing up for vasectomies, according to the researchers, as reported by HealthDay.
The impact is appreciable because of the fact that the protocols of tubal ligation procedures have more complexities and are 2-6 times more expensive than vasectomy, as a surgeon says.