Morning-after pill 'failing to cut abortion rate'

LONDON, Sep 15 (Reuters) Making it easier for women to get emergency contraception has not reduced abortion rates in Britain, an expert said today.

Professor Anna Glasier, director of the Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust in Edinburgh, said there was an argument that ''anything is better than nothing'' for women wanting to avoid pregnancy.

But, she argued, rather than heralding emergency contraception as a solution to rising abortion rates, the focus should be on getting people to take precautions before or during sex rather than afterwards.

''If you are looking for an intervention that will reduce abortion rates, emergency contraception may not be the solution and perhaps you should concentrate most on encouraging people to use contraception before or during sex, not after it,'' Glasier wrote in this week's British Medical Journal.

Despite increased use of emergency contraception in the UK, abortion rates rose to 17.8 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2004 from 11 per 1,000 in 1984.

Whereas one per cent of women requesting an abortion in 1984 said they had used it to try and prevent the pregnancy, six per cent had done so in 1996 and 12 per cent in 2002, said Glasier, who is also director of sexual and reproductive health at Edinburgh University.

The morning-after pill is available over the counter as well as through doctors, some hospital departments and sexual health clinics.

Official statistics show that over-the-counter purchases of the emergency pill rose from 27 per cent of all its sales in 2003/04 to 50 per cent in 2004/05.

Asking whether emergency contraception is ''worth the fuss'', Glasier wrote: ''If you are a woman who has had unprotected sex then of course it is, because emergency contraception will prevent pregnancy in some women some of the time - and if you don't want to get pregnant anything is better than nothing.'' Val Buxton, acting chief executive of Brook, a sexual health charity for young people, said easy access to emergency contraception was essential in enabling women to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

Abortion rates might be higher if it were not for the fact that emergency contraception was now more easily available than in the past, Buxton argued.

''There is doubtless still a need for better education about consistent and effective use of all forms of contraception, but no form of protection is 100 per cent reliable - condoms can split, people do forget to take pills,'' Buxton said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said emergency contraception had never been heralded as an answer to rising abortion rates in Britain.

''Our policy has always been that safe sex, using reliable contraception on a regular basis, is the best way for women to protect against unwanted pregnancy,'' she said.

REUTERS MQA MIR RAI0828