Schools and health clinics offer health and sex ed classes to educate communities about safe sex practices or abstinence in efforts to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancies and abortions. Sure, education is great, but maybe it’s more effective to offer free birth control — at least that’s what seems to be working for Colorado.
Beginning in 2009, the state started one of the largest real-life experiments by offering poor women and teenagers free intrauterine devices, or IUDs, and implants that prevent pregnancy for three or more years. IUDs can cost hundreds of dollars to implant, but when Colorado officials questioned whether these women would take the state up on this offer, The New York Times reported that these officials were shocked at the massive welcoming of the free birth control and further explained the results.
Teen pregnancies fell by 40 percent and the abortion rate fell 35 percent from 2009 to 2013, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The experiment also saw a similar decline in pregnancies in women under the age of 25 who were not married and haven’t yet finished high school.
Executive Director and Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Public Health and Environment Dr. Larry Wolk said in a news release: “We are working closely with our partners who believe in this initiative to find the funding necessary to continue providing contraceptive choices to young women across Colorado. Making sure Colorado women have access to safe and effective contraception is an investment in their futures and ours.”
A grant from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation funded the initiative.
The Colorado Family Planning Initiative provided upwards of 30,000 women with long-lasting reversible contraceptives for little to no cost with the help of private funding. Not only did this cause the teen birthrate and abortion rates to fall, but it also helped in saving the state more than $80 million in Medicaid costs.
The New York Times reported that in 2009, half of all women who had their first child in the poorest areas of Colorado had their child before the age of 21. Years later in 2014, that age increased to 24 giving women the time to finish their education and find a job.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told The New York Times, “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.”
The grant given to Colorado is running out and with the Affordable Care Act, some women are expected to be covered, but the National Women’s Law Center found that poorer women or women who would benefit most from cheap or free long-acting contraceptives only have plans that require payment or only offer certain methods of birth control that may not be what the women want. New health care plans are the only ones required to offer free contraception, so women under plans that were in effect before the healthcare law may not be eligible.
Currently, 275,000 women in Colorado need financial help for family planning, and as funding is running out for this “real-life experiment,” the number of women with access to long-acting birth control will slowly rise again. Colorado’s health department will still support Title X family planning clinics, but without more funding, will be forced to cut back on health care provider training, operational assistance for family planning clinics and the extremely beneficial financial help for IUD and other contraceptive implants.
With attempts to shut down abortion clinics and debate over women’s health, maybe it’s time for other states to take a page out of Colorado’s book.
Photo: Flickr user mara
