Colorado Succeeds In Pulling Down Teenage Pregnancies

For six years, Colorado has managed to conduct "a large, real-life experiment with long-acting birth control." State officials decided to offer teenagers and poor women free intrauterine devices and implants in order to prevent pregnancy, according to nytimes.

The results were astounding, as the pregnancy rate in the state plummeted by 40 per cent from 2009 to 2013, even as the abortions fell by 42 per cent, says the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Another group at the risk of unplanned pregnancies, that is unmarried women under 25, who were still in high school, was also open to the pregnancy control.

An anonymous donor funded the $23 million initiative, which also provided training, outreach and technical assistance to clinics statewide, according to cnn.

"Our demographer came into my office with a chart and said, 'Greta, look at this, we've never seen this before,' " said Greta Klingler, the family planning supervisor for the public health department. "The numbers were plummeting."

Places like Walsenburg, a small city in Southern Colorado that suffers from unemployment and unplanned pregnancies seemed to be welcoming to these implants, mainly intrauterine devices, which does not permit pregnancy instances for several years, at a clinic in Walsenburg, Colorado. A state program offering "long-acting birth control" has led to the falling births as well as abortion among teenagers.

In 2009, half of the first births to poor women happened before they turned 21, but by 2014, the age was pushed up to 24, which helped the women to complete their education and get jobs.

"If we want to reduce poverty, one of the simplest, fastest and cheapest things we could do would be to make sure that as few people as possible become parents before they actually want to," said Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. She argues in her 2014 book, "Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage," that single parenthood is a principal driver of inequality and long-acting birth control a powerful tool to prevent it.

Hence, teenage births have come down, yet experts feel that the timing and magnitude of the reductions in Colorado indicate that the state's program has brought it about.

Women's health advocates contend that long-acting birth control is giving American women more say over when - and with whom - they have children. About half of the 6.6 million pregnancies a year in the United States are unintended. Teenage births may be down, but unplanned births have simply moved up the age scale, Ms. Sawhill said, and having a baby before finishing college can be just as risky to a woman's future as having one while in high school.

"The difference in effectiveness is profound," said Dr. Jeffrey Peipert, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis, who ran the study. Even as the pill can fail by about 5 percent, the implants and IUDs tend to show a failure rate of just 1 per cent.

"There's been a big shift in the mind-set," said Dr. Laura MacIsaac, director of family planning for Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York. "The demand is coming from everywhere now."