2008-09 AMSA Legislative Agenda

4. Congress must assure access to comprehensive reproductive health services.

Background

For the past 10 years, anti-choice activists have spent more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars on unproven, dangerous “abstinence-only” programs 20 that prevent educators and providers from engaging in factual, open discussions with their patients about contraceptive options. Recent studies reveal that many of these programs also include serious misinformation and sometimes even outright falsehoods. Of the approximately 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur each year, 82% are unintended. More than one-quarter end in abortion 21. Approximately 14% of the decline in teen pregnancy between 1995 and 2002 was due to teens’ delaying sex or having sex less often, while 86% was due to an increase in sexually experienced teens’ contraceptive use 22. The United States continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world 23. More than one in five adolescents (21% of females and 24% of males) received abstinence education without receiving instruction about birth control in 2002, compared with 8–9% in 1995 24.
Abstinence programs do not prevent pregnancy, nor do they prevent transmission of sexually transmitted infections 25. 

The Prevention First Act will establish and fund access to preventive health care services and medically accurate education programs on contraception. These programs will: reduce the number of abortions performed by reducing unintended pregnancies; prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and support healthy families by improving women’s health.

AMSA Position

Congress must support and protect reproductive health services, reproductive rights and reproductive health education. These provide self-determination for women and adolescents in all aspects of reproductive life, including sexuality, health, and parenthood. Self-determination in reproductive health care is essential to eliminating health disparities in preventive health care for women and girls and their families.

The Prevention First Act [S.21] and [H.R.819] is a broad piece of legislation that will expand access to preventive health care services to reduce unintended pregnancy, reduce the need for abortion, provide responsible education about life and sex, and extend full access to health care for women and girls.

Congress must fund honest, evidence-based, realistic sex-education programs.

Congress must increase funding for Title X national family-planning services and expand Medicaid family-planning services to cover more low-income women.

Congress must guarantee equity in insurance coverage for contraception by ensuring that private health plans offer the same level of coverage for contraceptives as they do for other prescription drugs and services.

Congress must reduce teen pregnancy and reduce the need for abortion by providing $20 million in annual funding for competitive grants to public and private entities to establish or expand teen-pregnancy prevention programs.

20 Sexuality Information & Education Council of the United States. No More Money Website. Spending on Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs (1982–2007), http://www.nonewmoney.org/historyChart.html.
21 Guttmacher Institute, U.S. Teenage Pregnancy Statistics: National and State Trends and Trends by Race and Ethnicity, 2006, <http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2006/09/11/USTPstats.pdf>, accessed Aug. 27, 2008; Finer LB et al., Disparities in rates of unintended pregnancy in the United States, 1994 and 2001, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2006, 38(2):90–96.
22 Santelli JS et al., Explaining recent declines in adolescent pregnancy in the United States: the contribution of abstinence and improved contraceptive use, American Journal of Public Health, 2007, 97(1):1–7.
23 Singh S and Darroch JE, Adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: levels and trends in developed countries, Family Planning Perspectives, 1998, 32(1):14–23.
24 Lindberg LD, Changes in formal sex education: 1995–2002, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2006, 38(4):182–189.
25 Hauser D. Five Years of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education: Assessing the Impact. [Title V State Evaluations] Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, 2004.