Women prefer pill to sterilisation

The pill is still the No 1 contraceptive for American women, but it's even more popular in other countries, according to the first US government report comparing nations.
More US women, however, get their tubes tied than elsewhere, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
In the US, 16 per cent of married women say they use the pill.That compares to 29 percent in the United Kingdom and more than 40 per cent in the Netherlands and France.
About one in four US married women opt for sterilisation, also known as tubal ligation, or tube-tying. Sterilisation rates were below 10 per cent for most of the six countries included who collect those figures.
The patterns appear to be similar for all women, not just the married ones, said William Mosher, an author of the new report.
International comparisons are sometimes difficult because some nations only have information on married women, added Mosher, a statistician with the CDC's National Centre for Health Statistics.
The US numbers are based on in-person interviews of more than 7,300 women of childbearing age nationwide from 2006 through 2008. The rates were compared to those of eight other industrialised countries - France, Belgium, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The new report is the government's first national data on contraception use in more than five years. It found that the pill was the most used contraceptive by all women, but sterilisation was a close second. About 17 per cent of women say they use the pill, and nearly the same proportion said they were sterilised.
The US has seen a variety of new contraception options for women in the last decade, including a vaginal ring and a skin patch. Though many women have tried them, fewer than 2 per cent said they used one of those methods.
Contraception choices by US women have remained remarkably stable for decades, Mosher said.
"We seem to be stuck in this pattern of the pill and sterilisation are the leading methods," he said.
The pill was much more popular among women who have never had children - more than half of them use it. It was also more commonly used by white women and those who were more educated. More popular among older women is sterilisation.
Many Americans get their tubes tied after they have children, as a don't-have-to-worry-about-it-anymore measure, experts say. Younger women with less education more often turn to sterilisation, as well.
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