This piece comes to us courtesy of Stateline. Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.
President Barack Obama hailed a landmark achievement in his State of the Union address last month: Teen pregnancies in the U.S. have hit an all-time low. But the U.S. still has a teen birthrate of 31.2 per 1,000 teens, nearly one-and-a-half times the rate in the United Kingdom, which has one of the highest rates in Western Europe.
Colorado may have found a way to close the gap. The state’s teen birthrate dropped 40 percent between 2009 and 2013, driven largely by a public health initiative that gives low-income young women across the state long-acting contraceptives such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and hormonal implants.
Backed by $23.5 million from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, Colorado attracted national recognition for its program after Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper announced the results of a cost-savings study last summer. The state saved $42.5 million in 2010 alone, an average return of $5.85 in avoided Medicaid costs for prenatal, delivery and first year of infant care for every $1 spent on the program.
More important, Hickenlooper said, the initiative “has helped thousands of young Colorado women continue their education, pursue their professional goals and postpone pregnancy until they are ready to start a family.”
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Since then, Iowa lawmakers have approved a Medicaid program that makes birth control free to all women with incomes less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level ($35,300 for an individual). The state also requires health insurers to cover all birth control methods in their health plans.
In 2007, The Contraceptive Choice Project, which was funded through the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, analyzed the effectiveness of providing no-cost contraception to nearly 10,000 women of all ages in the St. Louis area.
Of the 1,404 teens in the study, 72 percent chose a LARC method. The teen pregnancy rate among those who participated was 34 per 1,000 teens compared to a national average at the time of 159 per 1,000 teens. The abortion rate among teens in the project also dipped to 10 per 1,000 compared to a national average of 42 per 1,000.
Both Iowa’s and St. Louis’ experimental projects have been shuttered.
