Amid reports of Colorado’s stunning success in reducing teen pregnancy by providing state-funded free birth control options, it’s worth noting RVA has also been very successful in helping adolescents avoid pregnancy, often from public or grant funded programs.
Amid reports of Colorado’s stunning success in reducing teen pregnancy by providing state-funded free birth control options, it’s worth noting RVA has also been very successful in helping adolescents avoid pregnancy, often from public or grant funded programs.
As of 2012, the latest year with data available, there were 497 teen pregnancies, for a rate of 40.7 per 1,000 females. This is “the lowest teen pregnancy rate in Richmond in decades,” said Dr. Donald Stern, director of the Richmond City Health District, at a press conference in December when the figures were released.
Part of this reduction is likely tied to the fall in teenage motherhood rates nationwide, said Gale Grant, adolescent health coordinator for the RCHD. Since a peak of 62.1 births per 1,000 teens in 1991, the teen birth rate decreased about 2.5 percent per year during the next 15 years, before sharply falling 38.4 percent between 2007 and 2013 for unknown reasons.
Richmond’s efforts on teen pregnancy come through several channels, Grant said. Along with general health programs such as teen-oriented clinic hours on Thursday afternoons and clinics based in five of Richmond’s housing projects for easy access, the city’s health department has also partnered with Richmond Public Schools to target pregnancy-prevention information to youth.
Known as HYPP – Helping Youth Prevent Pregnancy – the partnership provides education to students in grades 5-10 about contraceptives, reproductive health, smart decisions and more.
The other main prong of the the strategy came through an $85,000 grant from The Jenkins Foundation program of The Community Foundation, said Laurinda Davis, public health nurse supervisor for the RCHD.
The grant funds the provision of LARCs, or long-acting reversible contraceptives, to interested women in Richmond, as well as outreach work at some of the aforementioned clinics. The most common form of LARC is the intrauterine device, an implantable method of birth control that last five years and is highly effective. Since the grant program began in October 2013, Davis said, the RCHD staff have successfully implanted 179 IUDs. The program is scheduled to last until the end of September.
Because the Richmond City Health District does not release birth rate statistics for a given year until December of the following year, the full impact of this program will not be known until the end of 2015.
