Abortion, Cash, and Subsequent Contraceptive Use

Most women seeking abortion services want to avoid early repeat pregnancy. To evaluate the role of insurance coverage on women's use of postabortion contraception, researchers analyzed data collected from some 19,700 women who had a first-trimester abortion at one of 28 California clinics that offered same-day initiation of all forms of reversible contraception.

Overall, 94% of women left the abortion clinic with a form of contraception (21% with a highly effective method). In adjusted analyses, compared with uninsured (“self-pay”) clients, low-income women who qualified for state-funded healthcare were more than 3 times as likely to initiate postabortion contraception, and more than twice as likely to receive a highly effective reversible m…