IUD use effectiveness in an urban Guatemalan clinic.

Contraceptive continuation rates-the rates at which people continue to use a particular contraceptive method-can be a great help in determining whether a family planning program is effective or whether new contraceptive methods should be introduced. Until now, very little systematic work has been done to study contraceptive continuation rates in Latin America. The present article reports the results of one of the few existing studies on this subject, which examined the IUD experiences of women admitted to a large family planning clinic in Guatemala City. The study showed that these experiences compared favorably with the IUD experience of groups previously studied in Costa Rica, Taiwan, and the United States.