August 06, 2015 02:10 PM UTC

Terrible Anti-IUD Press Silences Colorado Senate GOP

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• by: Colorado Pols

A major battle this past legislative session over state funding for a highly successful program to provide long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), generally in the form of an intra-uterine device (IUD), continues to generate bad press for the one-seat Republican majority in the Colorado Senate responsible for killing legislation to keep the program going. There was some confusion in the immediate aftermath of that decision as to whether or not the program, which was started with private seed grant money, would continue without tax dollars–or if continued, whether services would be impacted.

As the Denver Post’s John Frank reported early this week, there have indeed been consequences for women’s health:

Over the past seven years, a private foundation donated about $27 million to boost the program, but the grant money expired July 1.

A push to use state taxpayer dollars to continue the program failed in the Republican-led state Senate earlier this year, killed by ideological and fiscal objections.

Now, a month after the money ceased, the county clinics that administer the program are starting to see the effects, as limited federal and state funding fail to meet high demand in some areas…

In Jefferson County, the state’s fourth largest, the public health department had to start a waiting list in July.

In Pueblo County, the clinics are reserving the high-end devices for clients under age 19 and those with Medicaid coverage, which will reimburse the cost.

According to Larry Wolk, director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the hunt continues for private funds to carry the program for another year, and he hopes it will come through in the next few weeks–which would allow clinics now forced to delay access to IUDs to resume at full steam. In response to GOP critics who say that private funds should continue to pay in full, LARC backers say that was never the purpose of the startup grants that funded the program up to now. Because the reduction in unintended pregnancies saves the state of Colorado considerable amounts of money, the state should pick up the cost for the LARC program to allow private grant dollars to flow to communities that don’t yet have this positive experience to motivate them.

In the months since the end of this year’s legislative session, the story of Colorado’s successful IUD program–and the inexplicable killing of legislation to fund it by the state Senate GOP majority–has been retold by news outlets across the nation. At one point in the after-debate, Senate Republicans fielded defenders like Sen. Ellen Roberts to try to explain why these funds were voted down. That didn’t go over very well to put it mildly, and in recent weeks, we’ve seen almost nothing in the way of comment from Republicans about the LARC program.

At this point, we have to think that no one is more eager to see CDPHE pull down private grant money to keep this program alive until the next legislative session than Senate Republicans. Repeated news stories documenting this program’s success, always with a word about the GOP killing the funds over “ideological and fiscal objections,” are very bad for this one-seat Senate Republican majority headed into a presidential election year. With Roberts already kneecapped out of the U.S. Senate race in part by her bumbling responses to this question, quantifiable damage has already been done.

And short of a huge about-face we don’t see coming, there will be more damage done by November of 2016.