Cheers and Jeers of the Year
BirthControlWatch.org
1. Jeer: The Cost of Birth Control on College Campuses Skyrocketed
When Bush signed the Federal Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, few knew it would scale back access to contraception for the group of people who need it most: college-age women. But that’s just what it did. It eliminated incentives for pharmaceutical companies to offer contraception at a discount to college health centers. In 2007, those centers ran out of their reduced-rate stock and were forced to increase prices to cover the new inflated costs. For many college women, birth control prices went up 900 percent – from $5 to $50. Since college women already have the country’s highest rate of unintended pregnancies, making contraception less affordable for them was a plan for disaster.
2. Cheer: Governors Said No to Abstinence-Only Money
In 2007, Colorado and New York joined the movement to reject federal funding for school programs that teach abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases and provide inaccurate information about birth control. With the addition of these two important states, a total of 14 states have now rejected efforts by the federal government to promote inaccurate, ideology-based and ineffective abstinence-only programs. As a result, more than a third of the funds available under this federal program are going unclaimed or unused. The 14 states are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.