Birth Control Beyond the Pill

NY Times: Birth Control Doesn’t Have to Mean the Pill, by Michelle Andrews:

There was a time when Becky Thurmond Fowler neglected to take her birth control pills for days on end. But she didn’t worry, because she and her husband, Dan, wanted to have a child at some point. “It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I got pregnant,” she said.

That attitude changed after Ms. Fowler had a daughter, Emerson, now 2 1/2. But with a new baby demanding all her attention, Ms. Fowler, now 33, found herself becoming even more forgetful about taking the pills. Soon she began to worry about the possibility of an unexpected pregnancy: “We were just rolling the dice.”

Many women struggle to find a birth control strategy that is effective given their particular circumstances. About half of all pregnancies — three million annually — are unintended. . . .