fact check: no evidence that morning-after pill being used as regular contraception
I'm very confused. I've been reading for months now that we live in a sex-mad society with no sense of propriety or traditional values, only to discover that:
One in eight women between the ages of 16 and 50 had no sex in the past year while the vast majority had only one partner, says a new report which paints Britain as a largely monogamous if not "sexless" society. [...] According to the ONS survey, one in six men under 70 had no sexual partners in the past year, while 73 per cent had only one partner and 12 per cent had more than one. For women, seven per cent had more than one.
There is one bit of very bad writing in The Telegraph that needs to be kicked apart:
Figures also showed that more than one in four women used the "morning-after" pill after forgetting to take the contraceptive pill, suggesting that the "morning-after" pill is increasingly used as a method of contraception despite medical concerns about women taking it frequently.
Wronggg. The ONS (Office of National Statistics) actually says (pdf) that 5% of women had used emergency hormonal contraception in the year preceding the interview - and of those, 22% said it was because they had forgotten to take the pill. So that's 22% of 5% of women using the morning after pill because they forgot to take the pill, or less than 0.5% of all women - and most certainly not "more than one in four women."
There's also no indication in these figures that such women are using the morning after pill on a regular basis, or as a routine complement to other forms of contraception. To jump to the idea that the morning-after pill is increasingly being used as a form of contraception is highly misleading. If such a trend were shown to exist, it would only apply to a tiny number of sexually active women. A far greater number of women take emergency contraception because of condom failure.
Now, let's see if anyone else makes the same false claim.
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