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Defending Dollars for Comprehensive Sex Education
Sometimes how a story is told is more important than the story itself. Case in point is our work with the Public Health Institute on the release of their study No Time for Complacency: Teen Births in California. As California faced its worst budget crisis in history, teen pregnancy prevention advocates knew they would have to contend with legislators wholly consumed with balancing a dire budget deficit. They hoped a draft study showing teen birth rates by legislative district would slow the tide. We knew they'd need something more. We advised the researchers to include one further statistic—the fiscal cost of teen pregnancies. By reframing the issue, legislators now saw that funding teen pregnancy prevention programs was far more fiscally sensible than paying for the huge cost of teen pregnancies in their region. Not only did the release of the study garner significant and sustained coverage (over 10 million impressions), the flurry of media and advocacy activity prompted legislators to make comprehensive sex education programs untouchable during the budgeting process. In total, advocates claim the study's release safeguarded more than $28 million for prevention programs in a year when every other state program was sliced. In fact, the study was so successful in this sense that California's leading women's health advocate and lobbyist lauded it as "the single most important factor in getting the teen pregnancy prevention money saved in this budget year."
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