The IUD is making a comeback more than 30 years after a generation of women was scared away from the birth-control device by the faulty Dalkon Shield.

This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals' Skyla, the first new intrauterine device on the market in 13 years. Planned Parenthood has launched a nationwide campaign in its clinics promoting a copper IUD as the most effective form of emergency contraception. And in New Orleans, three-year-old startup Bioceptive Inc. is engineering a one-step implantation device that its founders say will reduce the time it takes a doctor to insert an IUD to less than two minutes, from a procedure that currently can take five minutes to, at worst, an hour.

As of 2010, about 2.1 million U.S. women were using an IUD, the highest level since the early 1980s, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights organization with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Of women using contraception, about 5% use an IUD, which is still significantly less than the 27% who use the hormonal pill—the most popular method.

The IUD is 20 times more effective than birth control pills, the patch or vaginal ring, according to a 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That is because the IUD virtually eliminates the risk of human error.

Researchers tracked nearly 8,000 women and found that, over three years, nearly 10% of participants using the short-term birth control methods accidentally became pregnant. In contrast, accidental pregnancy occurred for only 0.9% of women with an IUD.