Episode Transcript
Dr. Jones: What would the life of women and their children look like if every woman had the information and ability to plan every pregnancy? This is Dr. Kirtly Jones from obstetrics and gynecology at University of Utah health care, and this is The Scope.
Announcer: Covering all aspects of women's health, this is the Seven Domains of Women's Health with Dr. Kirtly Jones on The Scope.
Dr. Jones: In the United States, almost half of all pregnancies are unplanned. In about half of those, the unplanned pregnancies were mistimed and about one-half of those pregnancies were unwanted. What would happen in the lives of women if they had all the information they needed to make a careful decision about pregnancy, or contraception, and they could get any method of contraception they wanted for free? Dr. Turok is a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology here at the University of Utah and a specialist of family planning.
Welcome, Dr. Turok. What happens in young women's lives when they have an unplanned pregnancy?
Dr. Turok: The largest group of women who have abortions in this country are those who have unintended pregnancies and as you mentioned, it a lot of people. It's over a million women a year. And for women who continue with a pregnancy, pregnancy is a chaotic time, as is child rearing, and if you're not planning for it from the get go, it further complicates things.
A population of people who have had planned pregnancies and a population of people who have had unplanned pregnancies and the children thereof, the kids from unplanned pregnancies are more likely to be born premature, to end up in the newborn ICU, to have less medical care in their first year of life, to do less well in school, and to not finish school.
Dr. Jones: So there are good reasons to build a structure around which families can be planned. We all want the kids that come to us, we don't all, but most of us want the kids that came to us because we, after the fact, create this incredible story about our kid was the miracle we didn't planned, but we love. But there are consequences to having babies that aren't planned.
Dr. Turok: There certainly are. The best predictor of having loving parents around to care for a child is to have been planning for that child from the beginning. And it's such an important predictor of how well children do that anything that we can do to help people time their pregnancies so they end up with the children they want, when they want them, only helps everybody.
Dr. Jones: In other countries, I know Europe does a pretty does a good job, people in Scandinavia do a pretty good job planning their children. What's keeping us in the U.S. from planning our children? Why do we have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies in the Western world?
Dr. Turok: The difference between Scandinavia and the United States are many things. It's sexuality education, it's the conversations that children and young people and their parents have regarding the expectations for intimate partners. And it's the availability of contraception. In Scandinavia many more women use the most effective, reversible methods of contraception like IUD's and implants. And what we've seen in the United States in the past decade is that as communities and states have broadened the availability of these most effective methods, the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion have plummeted.
Dr. Jones: What is it about America? Is it that we are a multicultural country? Because we don't have a unified healthcare system? Is it because we have diversity in income across the country? We have people who are truly poor. Why are we different than the Scandinavians, other than we don't have as many blonde people?
Dr. Turok: The biggest thing we see in disparities of unintended pregnancy are along socioeconomic lines, and race and class, and women of color, women who have completed less education, women who have fewer financial resources, are much more likely to have unintended pregnancies. In making opposites available and really removing all barriers to obtain methods of contraception will aid those people in determining when and if they have children.
Dr. Jones: We still have to reach out though to women. Women have to be thinking about contraception rather than just saying "oops", or, This is just what happens to me, and it happened to my mother and it happened to my sister." So how are we going to reach out to a vulnerable population of women here in Utah, here in Salt Lake County, to get their attention and say, "Are you sexually active?" Or whatever that means. "Do you want contraception? Do you want it for free? Come and see us." How are we going to reach out to the people who don't think they're going to get pregnant?
Dr. Turok: We've been working on this for quite some time, and the number one place people who want to initiate contraception, who have barrier of obtaining it come to in Salt Lake County is Planned Parenthood. So that's why we are collaborating with the four Planned Parenthood clinics in Salt Lake County to provide any method of contraception that women want that's offered at those clinics for free. And that includes the most expensive and the most effective methods, which are IUD's and implants.
Dr. Jones: And women who come in, they can get their method for free, but some of them actually might be willing to let us contact them in the years to come to see what happened with their lives using whatever method they chose.
Dr. Turok: Right. So we've started this project called "HER Salt Lake," or the HER Salt Lake Contraceptive Initiative, and what it does is we have three six-month periods. The first period is just the way it has been for very long, where people essentially have to figure out how they're going to get their method and pay for it.
The second period we eliminate all the costs. You walk in, you get the method you want, regardless of the ability to pay. And you don't pay anything.
And the third six-month period, we have a media campaign where women 18-29 years old will receive information on they had held devices that promotes the information about IUD's and implants and connects them with the places where they can get it for free. It'll be on Facebook, it'll be on Twitter, but it'll also be on pop up ads. It'll be modulated along the way to optimize the message and the way people receive it and when they get it. It requires a lot of community support, and support from outside resources, but we can get this done and we're working on creating a durable solution for this.
Dr. Jones: Years ago we had a picture of a pie which looked at the pregnancy outcomes in this country with the unplanned rate at a little over 50%, and for years and years that didn't budge, and you told me that your life's work was going to be to move the needle. How do you think it's going?
Dr. Turok: Yeah I think what I said was, if the shape of the pie doesn't change during the course of my work life, I'm going to be really upset that I didn't spend enough time skiing with my kids.
Dr. Jones: Dr. Turok, thanks for joining us and thank you for moving the slice of the pie that will be afforded to children who've been planned.
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