Health, Teens & Sex | featured news

Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births, a large study concluded Thursday, offering strong evidence for how a bitterly contested Obama administration policy could benefit women’s health.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that is most commonly passed between people during vaginal or anal intercourse. But it can also be transmitted through genital-to-genital, or hand-to-genital contact, which is how the participants in the study likely got the virus, the researchers said. Out of the more than 40 sexually transmitted HPV strains, more than a dozen have been identified as cancer-causing, according to the National Cancer Institute.