CO Family Planning Initiative that Cut Teen Pregnancies & Abortions Also Increased HS Grad. Rates
We have written before about Colorado's groundbreaking Family Planning Initiative [CFPI], which dramatically reduced teen pregnancies and abortions in the state beginning in 2009. The CFPI expanded contraceptive access by providing funding that made a wide variety of long-acting FDA-approved contraceptive methods available to clients in Colorado's Title X family planning clinics at low or no cost.
Illuminate: Colorado outlined their results in a report titled, Colorado's success with long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). Highlights included:
- Teen birth rate was nearly cut in half.
- Teen abortion rate was nearly cut in half.
- Births to women without a high school education fell 38 percent.
- Second and higher order births to teens were cut by 57 percent.
- Birth rate among young women ages 20-24 was cut by 20 percent.
- Average age of first birth increased by 1.2 years among all women.
- Rapid repeat births declined by 12 percent among all women.
- Costs avoided: $66.1-$69.6 million.
The Colorado program has now become a model copied by other progressive cities and states across the nation.
A new study published this week in the journal Science Advances found that the CFPI had an additional benefit; it also increased the graduation rate for young women in the state. This had been widely anticipated, but there hadn't been a comprehensive study to demonstrate the connection.
Science Advances: "We show that CFPI is also associated with significant population-level improvement in high school graduation among young women in Colorado. This improvement is important: Failure to graduate from high school sets individuals on a path of reduced lifetime educational attainment that has become increasingly associated with poor life chances, driving inequalities in lifetime earnings ... and mortality."
By: Don Lam & Curated Content
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