“Unwanted pregnancies are caused more by the failure of contraceptive methods than by their non-use”, explained yesterday José Cruz Quílez, president of the Spanish Society of Contraception (SEC). Specifically, he was referring to the condom, the method most used by Spaniards. A third of them use it incorrectly: before ejaculating, and the majority, only for vaginal penetration (it is a key tool to avoid sexually transmitted infections). Cruz Quílez saw the need to remember that the effectiveness of the condom is never total and that “if, moreover, it is not used well, it loses part of its effectiveness”.
This statement was produced the day after the figures of abortions carried out in 2022 came out. Voluntary terminations of pregnancy (IVE) carried out in Spain last year amounted to 98,136, of which only 17% were carried out in public centers and almost all were by the sole decision of the woman. These are data from the State Register of Voluntary Terminations of Pregnancy of the Ministry of Health, which places the IVE rate in 2022 at 11.68 per 1,000 women between 15 and 44 years of age.
It is the highest in a decade, since 2013, when it stood at 11.74 interventions, but the interpretation of the Ministry of Health is that the figure falls within the ordinary oscillations since then. According to the General Directorate of Public Health, the number “is in accordance with the rate fluctuations between 10 and 12 per thousand women in recent years, and once the pandemic is over they will adjust to the parameters of the last decade” .
Faced with this reality, both Cruz Quílez and José Gutiérrez Alés, president of the Spanish Contraception Foundation (FEC), reiterated at the press conference on the occasion of World Contraception Day the need to teach, and definitively, education classes sex-affective, especially when the average age at which young women start having sex is 16.2 years, four years less than their mothers, who are now 50.
The absence of this education, points out Gutiérrez, is causing teenagers to turn to porn. The increase in abortions also has to do with the viewing of these websites (few actors use condoms). “If we don’t influence education, we will get worse, and next year it won’t be a 9% increase, but a 20% increase”, explained the president of the FEC.
According to Cruz, another cause of the increase in IVEs is “growing hormone phobia”, especially among young people. “The new generations are embracing everything that is more or less natural and are running away from hormone treatments,” he explains. However, he warned that all these people who are moving away from hormone treatments are not replacing them with others. “If we really don’t want a certain method, we should use another, but not leave everything in the hands of low effectiveness methods.”
Both the SEC and the FEC insist that abortion can have serious psychological consequences for women. According to a study by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, women who terminate pregnancies voluntarily tend to feel guilty, which makes them feel isolated and alone. When it is carried out, the chances of suffering from depression and anxiety are multiplied by two and the risk of suicide by four.
