Five years after legalization, usage at 1.3 percent

http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/08/10/japan.pill.ap/index.html

Five years ago Japanese women's rights advocates won their battle to legalize the birth control pill. Now they are waging an even tougher fight -- getting women to use it.

If more people start to go on the pill in Japan, we will definitely have more HIV-positive patients," said Takuya Togawa, of the disease control division of the Health Ministry. "With the number of the pill users in Japan still low, we are not urgently worried about the outbreak of HIV. We don't regard HIV as something like SARS or bird flu that demands our immediate attention."

You and the Pill

uhm...

About 370,000 Japanese women use the pill, according to estimates, only 1.3 percent of the 28 million Japanese females between 15 and 49 years old, compared with 15.6 percent in the United States, according to the United Nations.
...
Experts say part of the reason is that, the pill is a prescription drug and therefore can't be advertised. They say other factors are simple conservatism, vague concerns about possible side effects and an unwillingness to enter into a daily pill-taking regime.
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Most women, however, still appear to be content with other contraceptives. Condoms account for about 80 percent of the birth control market; the rhythm method and spermicidal jelly are the next most popular means.

AP - Japanese Women Shun Birth Control Pill

Don't forget that Abortion is a favoured method of birth control...

but the real reason is that low dose pills are not readily available and these have some very very nasty side effects. Also the perception out there is that the pill are not good for Asian bodies...

Also it is expensive and the majority of doctors do not encourage their female patients to start.

The lack of information for women and also the level of ignorance of most women about their bodies is frightening. I am frequently shocked when talking to some girls.

BTW it is also not common for women to be offered pain relief during childbirth. In some ways, obn-gyn care here is akin to the 1960's.

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GomiGirl wrote:Don't forget that Abortion is a favoured method of birth control...

The most favored not mentioned above iiiis withdrawl!
And it works 2.

gkanai today wrote:AP - Japanese Women Shun Birth Control Pill

me last week wrote:Japanese Women Shun Birth Control Pill

Guess we're even now

gkanai wrote:uhm...

Gross-out warning....

Nasty piece of work lets
abortionists scrape by August 16, 2004 / Mainichi Daily News / By Marvin Feltcher, Staff Writer--- It is common knowledge that abortion has long been one of the most popular forms of birth control in Japan, largely because it's such an enormous money-spinner for those who perform the procedure that they have fought tooth-and-nail to prevent proliferation of alternative means.
Less well known, however, is that trade in aborted fetuses has also created a lucrative niche in the pregnancy termination market.
Helping expose the secret trade have been the recent raids on the Isesaki Clinic in Yokohama, which is accused of having routinely dumped aborted human fetuses in household garbage -- including unborn young terminated after the twelfth week of pregnancy who had body parts severed with scissors but who should by law have been accorded burial rights the same as people but weren't because of the costs involved.
"Aborted fetuses used to be laid out on a metal tray and employees would obey doctors' orders to use scissors to cut off the arms and legs,"...City of Osaka charges 1,700 yen for a full fetus aborted up to the end of the fourth month of pregnancy. Incidentally, comparative services the city offers include the 1,400 yen charged for disposal of more than one third of a severed limb, 1,100 yen for limbs where less than one-third has been cut off ....
<snip>
....Also suspected of making a packet out of aborted fetuses are uglier elements of the beauty business...Placenta beauty treatments are hot in Japan for their purported beneficial effects in combating the effects of aging and menopause.
"Ethical problems mean the most effective placenta for skin treatments, human placenta, can only be used in a select few medical institutions. Normally the placenta used in cosmetics comes from calves or lambs," a beauty magazine desk editor tells Tokudane Saizensen. "But, when you consider how lightly some take the value of a life, I don't think it's possible to rule out suggestions that there is a black market for placenta collected from aborted fetuses."

Skankster wrote:-
The most favored not mentioned above iiiis withdrawl!
And it works 2.

ummm no. It doesn't.

The problem with the pill is that they are marketing it all wrong. One mention that it "may increase breast size" to my J-Lady, and she wanted all the info on it that she could find.