Over the past one decade, the United States has experienced a fall in number of unintended pregnancies, according to a new study which analyzed thousands of pregnancies. It is good news for United States as the rate of unintended pregnancies is still very high compared to other countries. During the research, an unintended pregnancy was referred to a pregnancy which was not either planned or needed.

Researchers studied a data of 2000 pregnancies which included responses from women to know whether they wanted to get pregnant. The data was originally collected by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for National Survey of Family Growth. The rate of unintended pregnancies between 2009 and 2013 was compared with similar kind of pregnancies from 2006 to 2010.

The researchers concluded that the percentage of unintentional pregnancies has fallen to 45% between 2009 and 2013 from 51% between 2006 and 2010. Women in the study were generally aging between 15 and 44 years. There were 54 women in 1000 in latter period to go through undesired pregnancies, while in the former period the figure was at 45 out of 1,000.

"This is a very exciting thing to see because the rate has been somewhat stagnant for quite a while, and unintended pregnancy is a key measure of the extent to which American women are able to achieve their childbearing goals," said Lawrence B. Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, lead researcher of the new study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

There are ill effects of unintentional pregnancies on both child and mother, but could be worse for children as they are less likely to receive prenatal care or be breastfed, and more likely to have low birth weight. The reason why number has decreased previous years is use of long-acting contraceptive methods like intrauterine device by more women.