Colorado offered free birth control — and teen abortions fell by 42 percent – educate

Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment is seeking more funds to keep a privately funded birth control program that has, by many measures, been a startling success.

It led to a 40 percent fall in Colorado’s teen birth rate and a 42 percent drop in the nation’s teen abortion rate between 2009 and 2013, based on state datareported from the New York Times’s Sabrina Tavernise.

Young girls served with the family planning clinics also accounted for roughly three-fourths of the total decrease in Colorado’s teen birth rate. And the baby caseload for Colorado WIC, a nutrition program for low-income girls and their infants, fell by 23 percent from 2008 to 2013.

“But more importantly, it has helped thousands of young Colorado girls continue their education, pursue their professional goals and postpone pregnancy until they are ready to begin a family.”

However, the program has long drawn criticisms from social conservatives, who assert that it may encourage promiscuity. Since teens don’t have to be accompanied by an adult to get contraceptives in the centers, critics also state the initiative undermines parental rights. And some opponents reject the countries’ figures altogether. Lawmakers in Colorado’s Republican-controlled Senate made similar arguments when they blocked public financing for the program earlier this season.

There are multiple concepts for this decrease, ranging from greater use of long-acting reversible contraceptives to lead abatement programs.

However, Colorado’s teen birth rate seems to be declining much faster than its peers’ rates, as this chart from University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen reveals:

Between 2008 and 2012, the country went from the 29th-lowest adolescent birth rate in the nation into the 19th-lowest. And while one-fifth of women ages 18 to 44 in Colorado now use a long-acting birth control system, about 7 percent of US girls in precisely the exact same age group did from 2011 to 2013, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Nevertheless, the private grant which has sustained the app is beginning to run out — and state lawmakers do not seem interested in filling the gap with public capital, leaving its future uncertain.