Reaching Parenting has prevented many girls from graduating from high school

In 2009, in Colorado The Department of Public Health has developed a program that has enabled family planning clinics to promote affordable or cost-effective family planning services. In 2016, the birth rate of the state fell 54 percent women between the ages of 15 to 19, and the prevalence of pregnancy fell 63 percent among the same group.

Angela Fellers LeMire, director of the Colorado Family Planning Program sub-program, which oversees the project, said: “We were surprised by the decrease in the number of abortions and the high number of abortions, but we were happy that this happened.” public health was pleased with the work we did. “

Now, a study published in May in Scientific Advances shows that the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI) had another benefit: Many young mothers graduate from high school. Researchers at the University of Colorado schools in Boulder and Denver, in collaboration with members of the US Census Bureau, conducted the study.

Using the state American Research with a census from 2009 to 2017, the authors compared the number of graduates in Colorado before and after the government adopted a family planning program with 17 other countries without such legislation. The researchers say the program has reduced Colorado women between the ages of 20 and 22 without a high school diploma by 14%. This resulted in, among the other 3,800 women born between 1994 and 1996, graduating from high school at the age of 20.

“As someone who studies the subject, I was shocked. I did not expect to see this,” said researcher Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

For decades, the connection between accessing contraceptives and education or other accomplishments has been rare. One of the reasons for using contraceptives is, in combination federal program Title X-Providers of reproductive and reproductive health services, including family planning, for low-income and vulnerable people – and that improving fertility offers other financial benefits, such as the ability for people to complete their education. The new study, says Emily Johnston, senior researcher at the Urban Institute, who specializes in socio-economic research, “answers a question that the sector has long been looking for: What are the consequences, other than fertility, on people’s lives?”

“To date, evidence regarding the challenges of contraception in women’s education and opportunities has come from the 1960s and 1970s, but much has changed since then,” Martha Bailey, a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote to Wired in an email. “This letter shows that access to family planning services helps women to take advantage of opportunities and boost their confidence in the workplace.”

Identifying whether parenting opportunities – as opposed to alternatives to abortion or child rearing, school enrollment, fertility rates, or the availability of school programs for pregnant women – were important in increasing the amount of education, the authors compared the changes in Colorado and countries. the other 17. (The sample areas were Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.) All prices high school graduation and government policy, such as the spread of Medicaid insurance. “Anything is possible, but we haven’t got any regional opinion on this,” Stevenson said.

Another factor that could affect pregnancy is graduation from high school if young people were not sexually promiscuous. But, says Johnston, there is no doubt that Colorado will be unique. “You have to have reason to believe that the sex scene was changing in different ways in different countries,” he says.