Use of the morning-after pill has risen sharply among teenage girls over the last decade, as the teen pregnancy rate has steadily fallen.
Twenty-two percent of teenage girls took the morning-after pill in 2013, compared with 8 percent in 2002, according to a report on teen sex released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There has been little change in how many sexually-active teens use birth control measures, with 79 percent of females and 84 percent of males using some method of contraception the first time they had intercourse.
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But what has changed over the last two decades — and is likely contributing to the falling teen pregnancy rate — is that fewer teens are having sex in the first place. From 2011 to 2013, 44 percent of female teens and 47 percent of male teens had sex at least once.
Those rates ticked up slightly from the 2006 to 2010 period, but it’s still well below rates of teen sexual activity in 1988, when 51 percent of females and 60 percent of males had engaged in intercourse.
There also have been some changes in the type of birth control teens choose, although the vast majority still rely on condoms, followed by withdrawal and birth control pills. Use of the patch and Depo-Provera has fallen, while use of the morning-after pill has risen.
Small minorities of teens use contraceptive rings (5 percent) or implants (2 percent), two newer kinds of birth control that weren’t available in 2002.
Undergirding the shifts is a plummeting teen birth rate that has encouraged many healthcare advocates long-concerned that a higher percentage of U.S. teens bear children than in most other developed countries. In 2013, there were 26.5 births for every 1,000 adolescent females, a decline of 10 percent from the year before.
