COVID-19 and delays in entry to sexual and reproductive well being care

Entry to contraception was decreased through the COVID-19 pandemic. This particularly impacted people who skilled employment and monetary instability, in accordance with a examine printed within the Journal of Girls’s Well being.

Megan Kavanaugh, DrPH, MPH, from the Guttmacher Institute, and coauthors, recognized the prevalence of, and affected person and clinic traits related to, delays in entry to sexual and reproductive well being care as a result of COVID-19 pandemic throughout three states. Greater than half of respondents in Arizona (57%), 38% in Iowa, and 30% in Wisconsin have been unable to entry or indicated a delay in accessing sexual and reproductive well being care or a contraceptive technique as a result of COVID-19 pandemic In all three states, people who had skilled monetary instability on account of being out of labor, having fallen behind on key funds, or due to a job discount or loss on account of COVID-19 had elevated odds of experiencing delays in sexual and reproductive well being care.

“Importantly, our findings spotlight solely a small piece of the bigger image of how people’ reproductive autonomy was impeded as a result of pandemic,” concluded the investigators. “Additional analysis concerning the extent to which these COVID-19-related delays resulted in subsequent detrimental penalties for people—resembling having to depend on much less most well-liked strategies of contraception, forego contraception all collectively, and/or expertise undesirable pregnancies—is warranted.”

“Though the researchers demonstrated COVID-19-related delays in entry to sexual and reproductive well being care, linked to monetary instability, the findings revealed no affiliation between medical health insurance protection and COVID-19-related entry delays,” says Journal of Girls’s Well being Editor-in-Chief Susan G. Kornstein, MD, Government Director of the Virginia Commonwealth College Institute for Girls’s Well being, Richmond, VA.