Health: A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Birth control in the U.S. is out of date -- and getting more so

The dirty little secret about the birth-control "revolution" is this: three decades after the introduction of the Pill, many of the more than 57 million American women of childbearing age are still unable to control their reproduction. The proof: about six million unwanted pregnancies occur in the U.S. each year. Not only are all the available methods of contraception inconvenient, only partially effective or potentially risky, but the array of devices to choose from is also getting smaller, not larger. Some women must visit several doctors and spend hundreds of dollars before finding the contraceptive that is best for them. Others,...

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