Recession Woes Incline Women To Have Fewer Babies
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In today's utterly-unsurprising-but-still-necessary news, the Guttmacher Institute has released a report detailing how women living in households making less than $75,000 a year are responding to the recession by losing the desire to have a baby anytime in the near future. (PDF of the report here.) To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women. In many cases, in fact, economic hard times make it all the much easier to get pregnant on accident.
The report also found, for instance, that 8 percent of the surveyed women were skimping on contraception in order to save money, and 18 percent of pill users were taking pills inconsistently to save money, usually by skipping a month or delaying refilling their pills. And as Lauren Sandler wrote in The Big Money back in May, the recession can negatively impact contraception use in other ways. This recession has created more upheaval in people's lives—more job changes, more moving around for work, more stress in general—and all that makes it much harder to remember to take your pill on a regular basis, or to keep a box of condoms on hand. I suppose it's easy to tell yourself you can just lay off sex until you can afford you have more money for contraception, but that kind of planning rarely works out the way we hope it will. Let's face it: In hard times, staying in and having sex to entertain yourself becomes even more alluring, because it's relatively cheap.
You'd think that more people would make contraception a priority, since most of us know that abortion costs a lot of money, and babies exponentially more so, but it's long been observed in the sexpert world that most people feel guilty about spending real money on sex. People who will spend $100 a month on cable won't spend $100 on a sex toy they'll use all the time and will last forever.
Unfortunately, this short-changing can be tragic when it comes to contraception. Back in July, I interviewed Heather Busby of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and she confirmed that they've received an explosion in requests for abortion funding from desperate women since the economic crash last fall. All of which should confirm the pressing need for national health care reform that would make sure more women have the insurance coverage they need to afford regular access to contraception.
Comments
Given the recent volatility
By: KurtisJ | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 01:57
Given the recent volatility of the stock market, it comes to question whether maintaining a stock investment is a good idea at all. Well it can be – it just depends on how well you manage your investment portfolio. If you buy low, and then sell high, like it's best to – you can see some handsome dividends. First, you want to invest in a proven performer, or a company whose products/services are in high demand, or will be. Obviously, heavily investing on a company specializing in underwater basket weaving isn't the best idea, is it? You can make money in the stock market, but it has to be done carefully and prudently for it to pay off.
Recession Woes
By: satind7 | Thu, 09/24/2009 - 02:48
To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women.But that kind of planning rarely works out the way we hope it will. Let's face it: In hard times, staying in and having sex to entertain yourself becomes even more alluring, because it's relatively cheap.
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Fears are way overblown
By: Amanda Marcotte | Wed, 09/23/2009 - 18:08
We're not generally talking about women in their 20s thinking of waiting until they're 45 here. We're talking women who are putting it off for a few years. One major reason that infertility climbs with age is that a lot of women have untreated STDs, so one important thing that women can do is ask their doctor for routine STD testing, which is easy enough to do when you get a Pap smear.
money saved?
By: tokidoki | Wed, 09/23/2009 - 14:01
The problem with delaying conception, or at least intending to, is that whenever you do decide to get pregnant, or to try to, it may be far more expensive, depending on how long you delay the process. You may be able to get pregnant now, for free, and just have typical pregnancy/baby/childraising costs, or by delaying babies for a few years, it may take medical help, tests, medications, even IUI or IVF which are exponentially more expensive. And even with that said, should you need such help, there is no guarantee, after the expense, of a baby.
With all that said, I don't know anyone delaying having kids right now. I'm one of several women in my social group that are pregnant, have recently had a baby, or are getting ready to try, or are trying. If any have decided not to, it has nothing to do with finances, and mostly do do with their age, or they just feel after 1, or 2 or 3 that they are done, and one or both partners have been surgically sterilized.