Pro-Abortion Research Group Says Study Disputes Parental Notification 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
January 18, 2005
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) — The research arm of the nation’s largest abortion business claims a new study it conducted shows informing parents when teenagers want access to contraception does more harm than good. The group says the study’s results can be applied to abortion.
Researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s think tank, examined surveys taken by more than 1,500 girls younger than 18 who visited one of 79 family planning facilities between May 2003 and February 2004.
According to the AGI study, 60 percent of the girls said their parent knew they were going to the health clinic to obtain contraception.
Some 20 percent of those surveyed said they would rather engage in sex without contraception rather than tell their parents they were having sex.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of girls indicated that, if parental notification was mandated, they would purchase an over-the-counter contraception such as condoms and 18 percent would see their doctor.
Seven percent of the teenagers would stop having sex altogether if parental notification was required.
Pro-life groups say the study is biased in part because AGI is a part of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business that operates hundreds of health clinics targeting teenagers.
The study comes as the Food and Drug Administration is expected to decide this week on whether to allow the so-called morning after pill to be sold over the counter to women above the age of 16 years-old. Younger teenagers would still need a doctor’s note to obtain the drugs, which sometimes can produce an abortion.
A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco tracked 2,117 local women from age 15 to 24 for six months.
It found that increased access to the "morning after" pill did not lower pregnancy rates, because many women did not use the pills. In fact, only 55 percent of the women who had the pills already in their possession took them following sexual intercourse.
Just under one-fourth of the women in the study never used the pills during the six-month experiment. Only 20 percent said they used them more than once.
According to AGI, more than 900,000 teenage girls visited family planning clinics in 2001, the latest year for which data is available.
The AGI study will appear in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Related web sites:
AGI study abstract – https://jama.ama-ssn.org/cgi/content/short/293/3/340
