Women want state campaign against unwanted pregnancies

By Kevin Woster, Journal staff | Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Previous Page

Share

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• NewsVine
• Fark

Print

Email

Representatives of nine women's advocacy groups are urging Gov. Mike Rounds to develop a specific state policy to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in South Dakota.

And a spokeswoman for the organizations said Tuesday in Rapid City that she hopes the plan will involve much more than simply encouraging young people to abstain from sex.

"There's study after study that shows that just abstinence doesn't work," Cynthia Hilton said. "It would be wonderful if it did. But it doesn't."

Hilton is chairwoman of the women's health group for Democracy in Action, one of the organizations urging Rounds to accept their challenge to address the unwanted pregnancy issue. The others are the American Association of University Women, the League of Women Voters, NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota, National Women's Political Caucus, Planned Parenthood, South Dakota Advocacy Network for Women, South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence and South Dakota Now.

Hilton said the organizations involved are not making specific recommendations to the governor except to say that public education should be central to the effort.

After that, they believe Rounds should use state programs and experts in areas such as health and human-services issues to develop a plan to reduce unwanted pregnancies.

"The governor is in a position to provide the leadership to accomplish this," Hilton said.

The organizations held simultaneous news conferences in Rapid City and Sioux Falls, urging the governor to make reducing unwanted pregnancy a state priority. They had a letter delivered to the governor's office Monday.

Rounds spokesman Mitch Krebs said Tuesday that the governor hadn't seen the letter, which was delivered to his office staff. Rounds gets about 50 pieces of correspondence a day and will respond as soon as he can, Krebs said.

Advocates of abstinence programs did respond, however. They argued that comprehensive abstinence education can reduce the incidence of sex among young people and lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies. Kimberly Martinez, executive director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, referred to a recently released study by the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Utah-based research group that showed declines in sexual activity among groups of young people who had abstinence education.

The real failure is in sex-education programs that teach young people how to use condoms and other contraceptives, which receive 12 times the financial support of abstinence programs, Martinez said. Such programs encourage sexual activity rather than discourage it, she said.

"If you teach kids how to shoot a gun and hand them a loaded gun what are they going to do?" Martinez said. "Teach a kid to put on a condom, then hand them a condom and what are they going to do? We need to teach our kids to stand up to the peer pressure and take a stand for abstinence until marriage."

Hilton said young people need a broad base of knowledge and support to prevent unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta indicates that one-third of unintended pregnancies end in abortion, she said.

And the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unintended Pregnancy reports that such pregnancies pose a greater risk for premature delivery and low-birth-weight babies, she said. The research also shows that children born from unplanned pregnancies are more likely to have problems with physical and mental health, Hilton said.

Anne Barlow of the South Dakota Advocacy Network for Women said the CDC data indicated that about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unwanted. It's better but still too high in South Dakota at 36 percent, Barlow said.

Rounds needs to act aggressively to reduce that rate of unwanted pregnancies, which will also reduce the abortion rate, she said.

"We want to see those alarming numbers down," Barlow said. "And we believe that Gov. Rounds has the resources to make this happen."

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com