Race and class affect contraceptive recommendations

A woman’s race and ethnicity influence the types of birth control her doctor recommends. A new study from University of California San Francisco study confirms that doctors are influenced by these non medical factors when recommending the highly effective forms of contraception, specifically IUDs.

It has been confirmed in previous studies that doctors allowed socioeconomic and race to determine general healthcare recommendations. This study wanted to discover whether or not those factors also influenced birth control recommendations. And they do.

The study appears in the October edition of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. They found that clinicians were less likely to recommend IUDs to white women of low socioeconomic condition than to white women of high socioeconomic status. They also discovered that recommendations did not vary between black and Latina women. But when data was broken down by race, doctors were more likely to recommend IUDs to black and Latina women of low socioeconomic status than to white women of equal status.

“Understandably, people want simple answers but the complexity of the results is not surprising. We live in a complex world where race and class are intertwined,” said Christine Dehlendorf, MD, MAS, assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine. “Clinicians need to be cognizant of how their patients’ characteristics may influence the care they provide.”

And the reasons for the disparity could be insidious. “Providing contraceptive services is a particularly sensitive area of health care, both because of the intimate nature of the discussion of sexual behavior and because of the historical relationship of efforts to promote contraception with attempts to limit the fertility of minority and poor women in the United States,” Dehlendorf said. “Family planning providers should work to ensure that they provide quality, patient-centered care to all women.”

Source: UCSF, ScienceDaily