What family planning methods women use and why they change them

Each woman in a sample of 800 women from a nonprofit, private family planning clinic reported using at least one contraceptive method at some time in her life. Over the 15-year period that the sample represented, women made from 1 to 26 family planning visits. The women reported using as many as eight different methods and making up to 11 changes in method. The reasons for changing methods were, for the most part, logically related to the method, at least as far as common user complaints and side effects were concerned, but they also reflected misperceptions regarding relative risk of methods and a low tolerance for a method's disadvantages. A lack of congruence between choice and use was revealed, as women returned for care and reported that they had not used the contraceptive method they had chosen at the last family planning visit or had changed methods one or more times since that visit.