The federal government is offering more than $6 million in grants to entities to explore new methods of birth control, including new ways to get people who don’t use contraceptives to start using them.
The National Institutes of Health, which released the grant announcement Thursday, said new methods are needed because the number of unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. is still “extremely high.”
“In 2011, 45 percent of U.S. pregnancies were unintended, a substantially higher proportion than in Wester Europe (34 percent), Oceania (37 percent), Northern Africa (29 percent), and Western Africa (26 percent),” NIH said.
NIH is looking for new contraceptive methods that are safe, effective, and “acceptable to women and men.” A main focus of the funding is to develop new contraceptive methods for people who are at high risk of an unintended pregnancy and to study the “behavioral barriers” that reduce the level of contraceptive use.
NIH said high priority areas of research are “male contraceptive development based on steroidal or nonsteroidal action,” and “female contraceptive development based on non-steroidal mechanism of action.”
According to NIH’s grant announcement from Thursday, there is nearly $6.3 million available in the entire grant, and single entities can receive up to $1.5 million.
