Prevention First Campaign
The Prevention First Campaign works to promote a comprehensive approach to reducing the rate of unintended pregnancies and reversing the increase in sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS in Massachusetts. NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts is a leading member of the Prevention First Coalition, which is a coalition of organizations in Massachusetts who are concerned with the health of young people, women, and families. We are a proud member of CARE for Youth, a statewide coalition that supports and advocates for the Health Education Bill, which will provide comprehensive health education to all public school students in Massachusetts. To learn more about CARE for Youth and the Health Education Bill, please visit www.careforyouthma.org. Priorities of the Prevention First Campaign include: • Comprehensive health and sexuality education in all public schools. The Health Education Bill (S.102 / H.1641) would make health education – including comprehensive sex education – part of the state's core curriculum. Comprehensive programs teach the benefits of abstinence as well as provide information on contraception and disease prevention for teens. This bill requires school districts to teach medically accurate, age-appropriate health education in grades K-12. Act Now to Support Comprehensive Health Education! • Increased state funding of teen pregnancy prevention programs to $4m. Prevention programs have contributed to a 36% drop in the teen birth rate over the past 10 years, yet some communities in Massachusetts still struggle with teen birth rates over 200% above the state rate. Communities with high teen birth rates need funding levels that match the size of their need for prevention services. • Increased state funding of comprehensive family planning services. Current funding should be moved from line item 4513-1000 to a new "Comprehensive Family Planning Services" line item and increased by $1.9m bringing funding level to $6,637,002. This will ensure better access to critical services, provide HIV counseling/testing services to at risk clients and implement the Emergency Contraception statute, a statewide hotline and consumer education with $150,000. These programs provide comprehensive family planning services, counseling and education to low-income uninsured women, men and adolescents. Dramatic cuts occurred several years ago which the legislature has restored over the last two years. Still thousands of eligible women, men and teens do not have access to these services due to inadequate funding. This puts their lives and health at risk. • Restricting the use of state and federal abstinence-only funding. Include the following language in the DPH admin account 4510-0100 that restricts the use of state and federal abstinence-only funding: "Provided further that any state or federal funding shall not be used for classroom based abstinence-only programming." Research has demonstrated that abstinence-only classroom curricula often communicate medically inaccurate, harmful and misleading information to teenagers. Abstinence-only classroom programs promote ambivalence about the effectiveness of condoms to prevent pregnancy and STD's, and teenagers who participate are less likely to use condoms or other contraceptives when they do become sexually active. Massachusetts has historically used federal abstinence-only funds for an effective education media campaign, but now the funds are being used in Massachusetts solely for classroom programming. • Community based health and sexuality education services promoting healthy behaviors. This bill would require the Department of Public Health to establish a program of community based health and sexuality education provided by comprehensive family planning agencies. Adolescents, parents, guardians and staff of community based agencies would be the target populations to benefit from science based health information, education and outreach. This program was funded at $1m for several years but was the victim of state budget cuts.
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