Shift in attitudes over birth control

THE number of men and women undergoing vasectomy and sterilisation in Oldham has shown a huge fall.

And health bosses say the decline is down to more choice of contraception options.

New figures for procedures which take place in hospital show the number of vasectomies in Oldham fell from 252 in 2006/07 to just 67 in 2008/09.

The number of local women sterilised in hospital was down from 114 to 82 in the same period.

The statistics come from the NHS Information Centre, which says it has no figures available for procedures which take place in clinics outside hospital.

Its report on contraception states that sterilisations in England have fallen by three-quarters for women, while vasectomies for men are down by more than half in a decade.

But it also shows the number of visits to a contraception clinic by men has doubled over the last ten years, from 84,000 to 162,000.

Women remain by far the biggest users of clinics with about 1.2 million attending each year, and the number remaining relatively consistent over the last decade.

The report also shows that among both men and women, 16 to-19-year-olds are most likely to visit a clinic.

Around one in five women (281,000) and one in 25 men (55,000) among this age group visited a clinic in 2009/10.

As sterilisations and vasectomies fall, the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives — such as implants, injections and IUDs — is rising.

They were used as the main method of contraception by more than a quarter of women visiting clinics in 2009/10, compared with just under a quarter in the previous year and 18 per cent in 2003/04, when the data was first collected.

NHS Information Centre chief executive Tim Straughan said: “This report provides an insight into the changing use of contraception methods among English society.

“The big fall in the number of women opting for sterilisation and men opting for vasectomies indicates changes in a person's typical choice of contraception, and indeed the wider concept of attitudes towards family-planning in this country.

“The report also shows that, while women are very much the main visitors to contraception clinics, men are now using the services more than they were, but there remains a very large gap between the sexes in attendance numbers every year.”