Developments in Brief : Rabbits May Be Biggest Casualties of IUDs

Women who use intrauterine devices may face up to three times the risk of unplanned pregnancies after they switch to other birth control methods, a study warns.

The recent withdrawal of most IUDs from the market thus may lead to an estimated increase of 123,000 unwanted pregnancies annually among the 1.4 million women now using IUDs, according to an article in Family Planning Perspectives, a journal of the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Earlier studies have found that among women who stopped using IUDs, 45% chose sterilization and 22% switched to birth control pills. Those methods do not increase the risk of unplanned pregnancies. Sterilization has a failure rate of less than 1%, and birth control pills have a failure rate of 2%. But 14% of the women switched to diaphragms and 15% to no birth control at all. Diaphragms have a failure rate of about 19%.