Last month, the Guttmacher Institute, one of the most respected research groups on reproductive health, released new data showing trends in unintended pregnancy from 2012 to 2017. Additional tabulations of these data show that unintended pregnancy decreased by nearly 20% in Delaware from 2014 to 2017. This coincides with Upstream’s work to expand best-in-class contraceptive care across the state which began in 2014 and ended in 2019. This decline is more than twice the average for all states included in the report.
Although the COVID surges and vaccine rollout placed a temporary pause on our active training and in-person technical assistance work, we’ve continued to advance our program model with over 30 agencies this year. We are currently poised to return to full programmatic capacity by early 2022, thanks in part to our pivot to successful virtual training which allows us to deliver impact more efficiently.
When our work began in 2014, Delaware had among the highest rate of unintended pregnancies. This new data supports other data we have shared previously, including the reduction in unintended births over the same time period and data demonstrating Upstream’s intervention in Delaware had a statistically significant, causal impact — in the context of strong patient choice.
Upstream continues to focus its efforts to deliver access to best-in-class contraceptive care in Washington, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Rhode Island, ramping up our programmatic work this fall and remaining on track to reach more than one million women. As we look ahead, this new data continues to fuel our relentless drive to do all we can to achieve impact at scale for millions of women nationwide.
