Letter to the Editor: Protect women's right to abortion

Hi everyone! I just wanted to share this letter to the editor of the Times Union, written by a loyal donor and advocate for Planned Parenthood on our behalf.  Read it at TimesUnion.com or just continue on after the jump.

Study: teens who live near a Planned Parenthood are less likely to drop out of high school

From UHPP CEO, Chelly Hegan:

"We have had so many conversations over the past few years (maybe more), about the relevance of Planned Parenthood and why what we do is so different than what FQHCs [Federally Qualified Health Centers] have to offer...This article from Vox referring to an even larger article from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology focuses on this very question."

Highlights from the Vox article include:

Teenage girls who live near a Planned Parenthood clinic are 16 percent less likely to drop out of high school, a new study finds. 

Lots of studies have found that teen moms are significantly less likely to graduate from high school than non-parents; 30 percent of female dropouts cite "pregnancy" and "parenthood" as key reasons for discontinuing their education. 

This new research, published Wednesday in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, looked at both Planned Parenthoods that provide abortions and those that do not. And it found that in either case, living close to one (within a neighborhood of 100,000 people) was associated with fewer female high school dropouts.

 The full study is here in abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether geographic access to family planning services is associated with a reduced female high school dropout rate. 

METHODS: We conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study. We merged the location of Planned Parenthood and Title X clinics with microdata from the 2012-2013 American Community Surveys. The association between female high school dropout rates and local clinic access was assessed using nearest-neighbor matching estimation. Models included various covariates to account for sociodemographic differences across communities and male high school dropout rates to account for unmeasured community characteristics affecting educational outcomes. 

RESULTS: Our sample included 284,910 16- to 22-year-old females. The presence of a Planned Parenthood clinic was associated with a decrease (4.08% compared with 4.83%; relative risk ratio 0.84, P<.001) in female high school dropout rates. This association was consistent across several model specifications. The presence of a Title X clinic was associated with a decrease (4.79% compared with 5.07%; relative risk ratio 0.94, P=.03) in female high school dropout rates, an association that did not remain significant across model specifications. 

CONCLUSION: Local access to Planned Parenthood is associated with lower high school dropout rates in young women. 

(C) 2016 by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.

There you have it. Just one more item to add to the growing list of reasons why having a Planned Parenthood health center is beneficial to your community!