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April 29, 2025
Quarterly Article
Constanza Hurtado-Acuna
Michael S. Rendall
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
Context: The 2015 to 2020 Delaware Contraceptive Access Now (DelCAN) initiative was motivated by Delaware’s having among the highest rates of unintended pregnancies in the United States, of which were either wanted later or unwanted. The expectation of the DelCAN initiative was that by providing greater contraceptive access, especially to long-acting reversible contraception, Delaware’s unintended-pregnancy rates could be substantially reduced. In this study, we assess the role of the DelCAN in explaining, for live births, changes in women’s pregnancy intentions around the time of conception.
Methods: We examine not only pregnancy intentions, but also the planned status of the pregnancies, including whether the woman was trying to get pregnant and whether she or her partner was using contraception when an unplanned pregnancy occurred. We use the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System data with difference-in-difference estimators to compare Delaware with six states in 2007 to 2020 with respect to the planned status of pregnancies ending in births and with 14 states in 2012 to 2020 with respect to the intended status of pregnancies ending in births. Because several components of the DelCAN were designed to facilitate contraceptive access for low-income women, we conduct both an overall analysis and separate analyses for Medicaid-covered and non-Medicaid–covered women.
Findings: The DelCAN was not associated with reductions in unintended pregnancies ending in births in Delaware relative to comparison states but was associated with an increase in pregnancies that were wanted sooner. DelCAN was also associated with an increase in planned pregnancies concentrated among Medicaid-insured women and produced through reductions in pregnancies occurring when not using contraception.
Conclusions: Pregnancy intentions and pregnancy planning should be treated as distinct concepts in contraceptive-access program design and evaluation. Programs should attend to both pregnancies wanted later and pregnancies wanted sooner to address public health goals in concert with enhancing women’s reproductive autonomy.
