Summary Of Policy Solutions For Unintended Pregnancy

When it comes to solutions against teen and young adult pregnancy the article titled “Policy Solutions for Preventing Unplanned Pregnancy” written by Adam Thomas has many great solutions for helping to prevent pregnancy while also looking into research on the causes of unintended pregnancy and the impacts of pregnancy prevention policies. The author explains that unintended pregnancy is a widespread problem with far-reaching implications: almost half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and the women and children involved in these pregnancies are disproportionately likely to experience a range of negative outcomes (Thomas, 2012). The author of the article says there are three broad categories behind the high rate of unintended

The most successful programs tend to emphasize sexual abstinence as the only true option while also educating teenagers and young adults about how to use various methods of contraception. Research shows that some of the best designed interventions produced reductions of 15 percent or more in rates of sexual activity and increases of 25 percent or more in rates of contraceptive use (Thomas, 2012). Although abstinence-only sex education programs are also designed to discourage teens from having risky sex. The majority of high-quality research literature on these programs suggests that they have little effect on the behavior of the individuals who participate in them (Thomas, 2012). Although abstinence only programs are good way to go because it teaches truly, 100 percent pregnancy avoidance, in today’s society abstinence seems to be a way of the past, for some at

Family planning services are made available to low-income women via Medicaid and the eligibility for these services has been limited to women who are pregnant and to mothers whose incomes are below average. A recent and well-designed study by Economists Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phil Levine of Wellesley College used quasi-experimental methods to explore the effect of expanded eligibility for subsidized family planning services in waiver states on women’s contraceptive use (Thomas, 2012). The authors concluded that these expansions resulted in a reduction of about 5 percent in the number of sexually active adult women who fail to use contraception at a given act of intercourse. They also found that the expanded family planning services produced reductions of about 4 percent in the number of births to teens and about 2 percent in the number of births to non-teens (Thomas,