**Forms of Contraception**

**Chapter 11**

**Provisional chapter**

**Contraceptive Methods and the Subsequent Search for**

Many women are concerned about their future fertility, about pregnancy complications and about the health of their future child when choosing a contraceptive method and sometimes women want to interrupt the contraception – maybe after years of use – in order to attempt pregnancy. Return to fertility, has been thoroughly analyzed in the literature. This chapter provides evidence-based information and discusses the potential doubts of women. Return to fertility has been consistently found to be sure, albeit sometimes slightly slow in the short term: pregnancy rates after 1 year of contraceptive interruption are 79–95% for oral contraceptives, 79–96% for levonorgestrel IUD, 71–91% for copper IUDs, around 80% for implants and 75–80% for injectable contraceptives. About 50% women are pregnant 3–6 months after contraceptive discontinuation; around 90–95% of women had achieved pregnancy 2 years after stopping their contraceptive method. Some studies have found associated risks of fetal malformations when women take oral contraceptive pills *after* conception (though other studies disputed these results). However the offspring of women who used oral contraceptives *before* conception does not show an increased risk of fetal death, miscarriage, gestational hypertension, major newborn structural defects or hypospadias. The effect on birth weight seems small and inconclusive. **Keywords:** return to fertility, contraceptive, UID, copper, pill, contraceptive implant,

**Contraceptive Methods and the Subsequent Search for** 

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.72525

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Contraceptive methods are the instrument that women use to control their fertility at any given time in their lives so that the pregnancy would be produced by choice and not by

**a Pregnancy**

Alicia Pouso Rivera

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

**a Pregnancy**

Blanca Patricia Bautista Balbás,

Blanca Patricia Bautista Balbás, Luis Alfredo Bautista Balbás and

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72525

Luis Alfredo Bautista Balbás and Alicia Pouso Rivera

hormonal contraceptive, injectable, depot, pregnancy rate

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

**Provisional chapter**
