Having a baby is a life-changing moment, and a significant number of women in West Virginia and across the country find themselves facing that experience without having planned for it.
Research from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy shows that half of all pregnancies in West Virginia are unplanned. In 2010, public spending in the state on those pregnancies and births totaled $145 million.
While our teen birthrate has been steadily declining, we still have one of the higher rates in the country, at 40 births per 1,000 teen girls (age 15-19) in 2013, ranking West Virginia 45th. (Only Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas are higher.)
Teen births are expensive, not only in public dollars for immediate care, but in the long-term outcomes. According to the Centers for Disease Control, only 50 percent of teen mothers get their high school diploma by age 22, compared with 90 percent who have not given birth.
CDC research also finds that children of teenage mothers are more likely to drop out of school, have health problems, end up in jail, face unemployment as an adult and give birth as a teenager.
All this leads to the importance of planning a pregnancy, while also having available effective birth control.
Colorado has participated in a remarkable privately-funded experiment over the last six years, where the state health department made a concentrated effort to get teenagers and poor women access to free long-acting intrauterine devices. The New York Times reports, “The birthrate for teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent.”
IUD’s are the most effective method of birth control (after abstinence), but they are not commonly used. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only six percent of women 15-44 used long-acting birth control methods in 2012.
West Virginia, like every other state, participates in a federal program that provides family planning services to women who want or need contraceptive services, but cannot afford them. Those services are available through more than 160 local health departments, clinics, hospitals and private physician offices.
However, providing birth control for girls and young women remains a sensitive issue. As one health official told me privately, the health officials often fear advocating too vigorously for contraceptives for teens because they will be perceived as promoting sexual activity.
The reality, however, is that kids are having sex. The CDC reports that in 2013, “47 percent of all high school students (including 48% of boys and 46% of girls) reported having sexual intercourse.” However, while an increasing percentage of sexually active students report using some form of birth control, less than two percent said they used an implant or an IUD, which has a failure rate of less than one percent compared with five percent for the pill. Plus IUDs last for several years and there’s no risk of forgetting to take a pill.
Yes, the IUD’s are more expensive than other contraceptives–it can cost up to $1,000 to have the t-shaped device inserted in the uterus—but that’s substantially cheaper than an unwanted pregnancy.
Brookings Institution economist Isabel Sawhill, author of “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage,” told the Times, “If we want to reduce poverty, one of the simplest, fastest and cheapest things we could do would be make sure that as few people as possible become parents before they actually want to.”
West Virginia is not a wealthy state and the challenges in our pockets of severe poverty are perpetuated by the cycle of children having children. Colorado’s experiment shows at least one approach West Virginia could take to try to break that cycle. But it won’t happen until we better utilize long-term birth control methods available in order to give our children a fair chance at their futures.