The original title of this article was going to be, “Why don’t we have a Planned Parenthood here?” But Planned Parenthood is something of a political landmine. So, instead, let’s just have a conversation.

Is it an awkward conversation? Absolutely. Do we need to have it? Absolutely, now more than ever. The conversation revolves around the rate of teen pregnancy in Mesa County and in the state of Colorado altogether.

The good news is that as a whole, teen pregnancy rates in the state are going down and have been doing so at a great pace. In 2015, the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) said the teen pregnancy rate fell 48 percent from 2009-2014, and the rate of abortions also fell 48 percent.

This decline in teenage pregnancy is attributed to Colorado’s Family Planning Initiative that set out to give more women access to birth control and other family planning services. The results are in: it works.

So, why has Mesa County not seen the same effects? Again, the good news is in Mesa County, the rate of teen pregnancy is going down, but it’s still well above the rest of the state. And there are people working on it, including the Mesa County Health Department.

In their report titled, “Mesa County Community Health Needs Assessment,” MCH said. “Although the teen fertility rate in Mesa County has substantially decreased since 1990, it remains significantly worse than the rest of Colorado. This shows an opportunity to educate young adults about preventing pregnancy and practicing safe sex.”

The numbers that MCH gave were 28 per 1,000 females between the ages of 15-19 living in Mesa County get pregnant, compared to 19.4 per 1,000 in the entire state. That is not good.

Why? Teenage pregnancy is costly, and not just for the mother. Hospital costs of having a

baby could go into the tens of thousands of dollars range, and that’s just having the baby. Car seats, diapers, formula, clothes they’ll grow out of in a matter of months, cribs, any medicines the children needs and the annual costs of caring for a baby can be thousands of dollars on top of that.

Now, picture where you were as a teenager, for just a moment. Did you work? Fantastic if you did, but were you making a large salary? Probably not, but you probably only needed it for things like food, or gas in your car, simple stuff like that. Would you be able to afford a baby on the salary you made as a teenager in high school? Would you be able to afford it now?

Do you think you would be able to go to school with a child? You would probably need a babysitter every day or daycare of some sort. Could you afford to go to college with a baby when you were a teenager? Odds are good that you probably couldn’t and that is the problem. Teen pregnancy takes teenagers out of school, and it becomes a lot harder to get a job if you don’t have an education.

Simply put, teenagers in today’s world are not prepared to have kids on their own. Mesa County recognizes the problem it has, and should continue working on getting the teen pregnancy rate down to at least that of the rest of the state.

Is there a magic elixir solution? No, and if there was, I wouldn’t be writing about it in the newspaper, but I’d be selling it out of a book. What we can do, though, is simply petition our local government for more funding towards family planning initiatives in the area, and more funding towards safe sex education, as MCH said in their report. At the personal level, there isn’t much we can do, but as a collective, if we demand our representatives to help out with this issue, they are constitutionally obligated to hear our concerns and address them.

I know for a fact that I am not ready for a child, and much to the chagrin of my mother, probably never will be. This is about protecting the future of Mesa County’s teenagers and giving them the opportunity to decide when and how they want to have children.