I know, I’m as shocked as you are.
Right there with them
Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births, a large study concludes. The findings were eagerly anticipated and come as a bitterly contested Obama administration policy is poised to offer similar coverage.
The project tracked more than 9,000 women in St. Louis, many of them poor or uninsured. They were given their choice of a range of contraceptive methods at no cost — from birth control pills to goof-proof options like the IUD or a matchstick-sized implant.
When price wasn’t an issue, women flocked to the most effective contraceptives — the implanted options, which typically cost hundreds of dollars up-front to insert. These women experienced far fewer unintended pregnancies as a result, reported Dr. Jeffrey Peipert of Washington University in St. Louis in a study published Thursday.
The effect on teen pregnancy was striking: There were 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study. Compare that to a national rate of 34 births per 1,000 teens in 2010.
There also were substantially lower rates of abortion, when compared with women in the metro area and nationally: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study, compared with 13.4 to 17 abortions per 1,000 women overall in the St. Louis region, Peipert calculated. That’s lower than the national rate, too, which is almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women.
In fact, if the program were expanded, one abortion could be prevented for every 79 to 137 women given a free contraceptive choice, Peipert’s team reported in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
The findings of the study, which ran from 2008 to 2010, come as millions of U.S. women are beginning to get access to contraception without copays under President Barack Obama’s health care law. Women’s health specialists said the research foreshadows that policy’s potential impact.
“As a society, we want to reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion rates. This study has demonstrated that having access to no-cost contraception helps us get to that goal,” said Alina Salganicoff, director of women’s health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“It’s just an amazing improvement,” Dr. James T. Breeden, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said of the results. “I would think if you were against abortions, you would be 100 percent for contraception access.”
You would think so, wouldn’t you? But of course the same so-called “pro-life” zealots in our Legislature also spent the last session slashing funds for family planning services, thus doing their best to ensure that we have a maximal unwanted pregnancy rate. Sen. Dan Patrick once told Paul Burka that even if he opposed the sonogram bill, he ought to “celebrate if a life was saved because a woman, who chose to see the sonogram, or hear the heartbeat, decided to keep her child, or put it up for adoption”. You’d think people like that would want to take every reasonable step they could to reduce the number of abortions, but clearly their definition of “reasonable” doesn’t include family planning or contraception. Instead, this is what we get from the “pro-life” lobby:
Jeanne Monahan of the conservative Family Research Council suggested contraceptive use can encourage riskier sexual behavior.
“Additionally, one might conclude that the Obama administration’s contraception mandate may ultimately cause more unplanned pregnancies since it mandates that all health plans cover contraceptives, including those that the study’s authors claim are less effective,” Monahan said.
It’s about the sex, you see. It’s always been about the sex. If you’re going to have the kind of sex that the Family Research Council doesn’t approve of, then you deserve whatever consequences you suffer as a result.