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According to report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unintended pregnancies in the United States could be costing tax payers over $11 billion each year. The report said two previous studies examined costs for prenatal care, pregnancy, labor and delivery, and infant care for 1 year after birth. Researchers were unable to estimate long-term costs of unintended pregnancy and all nonmedical costs because such costs are more difficult to estimate.

According to report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 37 percent of births in the United States are the result of unintended pregnancies. This number has been fairly stable since 1982.

"Trying to prevent unintended births is sort of an increasingly difficult task," said William Mosher, a statistician at NCHS and the study's lead author.

Researchers questioned more than 12,000 women from 2006 to 2010 who had given birth to live babies. In 1982, white, married women accounted for 66 percent of births in the United States, but now only accounts for 43 percent of total births.

Researchers also found that about 23 percent of married women had an unintended pregnancy, compared with 50 percent of unmarried women who were living with their baby's father and 67 percent of unmarried women not living with the baby's father; nearly 77 percent of teens' pregnancies were unintended, compared with 50 percent of women ages 20 to 24 and 25 percent of women ages 25 to 44; almost 17 percent of women with a college degree had unintended pregnancies, compared with 41 percent of women without a high school diploma; nearly 54 percent of black women reported an unintended pregnancy, compared with 43 percent of Hispanic women and about 31 percent of white women.

Researchers say unmarried women, black women, and women with less education or income are still much more likely to experience unintended births compared with married, white, college-educated, and high-income women.

Past researches have shown that births that were unintended by the mother are at elevated risk of adverse social, economic, and health outcomes for the mother and the child. Unintended births are associated with delayed prenatal care, smoking during pregnancy, not breastfeeding the baby, poorer health during childhood, and poorer outcomes for the mother and the mother-child relationship. Longer-term negative consequences for children have been found by some studies of unintended pregnancies that track the children into adulthood. 

The CDC said unintended pregancies might be a result of cohabitation and 14 percent of unintended births came about from cohabitating couples.