By Juliana Britto Schwartz • @JulianaBrittoS • 11 years ago

Poor women of color receive more counseling for emergency contraception

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The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has released a report showing that black, Latina and low-income women are more likely to receive counseling for emergency contraception. According to this New York Times piece, “Eleven percent of white and Hispanic women and 7.9 percent of black women reported having used emergency contraceptives at least once, but Hispanic and black women were more than twice as likely to have had their health care provider discuss emergency contraceptive options during routine pap smears and pelvic exams. The survey found that 18 percent of Hispanic women, 12 percent of black women and 5.7 percent of white women were given such advice by their clinicians.” The survey also demonstrated that poorer women were more likely to receive counseling on emergency contraceptives:  13 percent of women below the poverty level and only  4.9 percent of women above the poverty line. Also, women with continuous health care coverage were half as likely to be given emergency contraception information as women who had been without health insurance at some point.

The article points out that the number of women are using emergency contraceptives in general has risen significantly since 2002. However, this rise is more pronounced for the above-mentioned populations.

Why might that be? Though the article draws few conclusions, I’m going to hazard a guess: black, Latina and poor women face a lot of barriers in accessing reproductive healthcare services. This means that their chances of having unprotected sex, or of having to use a birth control method that doesn’t work well for them are higher. They are more likely to have pregnancy scares, and to need emergency contraception.

So while I am happy to hear that access to this crucial resource has been increasing for these women, I would hope that the same is true for their access to comprehensive reproductive health care, one that might keep them out of these emergency situations.

 

 

Bay Area, California

Juliana is a digital storyteller for social change. As a writer at Feministing since 2013, her work has focused on women's movements throughout the Americas for environmental justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive justice. In addition to her writing, Juliana is a Senior Campaigner at Change.org, where she works to close the gap between the powerful and everyone else by supporting people from across the country to launch, escalate and win their campaigns for justice.

Juliana is a Latina feminist writer and campaigner based in the Bay Area.

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For the past few months, I’ve seen several articles — almost exclusively written by white women — arguing that we shouldn’t enforce Title IX protections for survivors of sexual assault because the authors ...