Colorado State House
Pro-life medical doctors and women’s advocates in the state of Colorado won a small victory this week when they convinced the state’s legislature to defeat a bill that would have provided low-income girls with contraceptive implants without their parents’ consent.
The National Catholic Register is reporting on the defeat of H.B. 1194 which would have provided $5 million in tax dollars to continue a pilot program begun in 2009 that gave girls as young as 14 long-acting contraceptive implants and IUD’s (intrauterine devices) for free and without their parents’ knowledge.
Jennifer Kraska, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, told the Register that the bill’s defeat was a true victory for women and girls.
“I think it was an eye-opener for a lot of people for Colorado to say this is not where we need to be spending our money if we want to impact the lives of women and girls.”
Unfortunately, the program has been operating under a private grant since 2009, but the bill’s defeat means the state will not agree to keep it in place with taxpayer funds.
“Those supporting taxpayer funding for free implant and IUD giveaways to kids claim the program reduced the number of low-income pregnancies and abortions in Colorado (and hence would save the state huge amounts of welfare money),” the Register reports. “They also argued that preventing pregnancy would help teen girls finish their schooling. During the time the program was in place, Colorado’s birth rate among inner-city teens dropped 40%.”
While it’s true that abortion rates in Colorado fell by 42 percent during the six years the program was in place, Denver-area pediatrician Dr. Michelle Stanford said there’s no good evidence that the program caused the drop in pregnancies. Teen birth rates were already at historic rates due to a combination of less sexual activity and more use of contraception. Higher number of Colorado teens were also professing to be abstinent during the time the program was in force.
Stanford said the contraceptive program “probably had some impact on birth rates,” but how much of that impact was due to the giveaway program and how much to other unmeasured factors is impossible to gauge.
She raised another important issue about the safety of implanting such young girls with these allegedly “safe” contraceptives – something that has never been adequately studied.
“None of the studies [cited] are very big or very good,” Stanford told the Register. “Simply from a scientific perspective, not even considering the moral aspects of this, I don’t see that there’s good science to say that long-acting contraceptives are safe in this population.”
For women in general, long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) have been known to cause serious side effects. At the present time, the manufacturers of two popular new LARCs – Nuva-Ring are Mirena – are facing lawsuits for millions of dollars in damages to women who have been harmed by these devices.
Pro-life women in the state generally agree that temporarily sterilizing teen girls with potentially dangerous drugs – without their parents’ consent – is a very bad idea.
At least for now, this very bad idea has been shelved.
“The issue will be back again next year,” Kraska said. “It’s an ongoing battle. But in the short term, we’ll take whatever victories we can get.”
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