That’s why I want to highlight Delaware. It has been arguably the most aggressive state in expanding access to long-acting forms of birth control, like IUDs and other implants. Less than a decade ago, Delaware had the nation’s highest rate of unplanned pregnancies, and its governor at the time — Jack Markell, a Democrat — came to believe it was a major cause of economic hardship for mothers and their families.

“We launched this effort several years ago because we feel so strongly about the link between unintended pregnancies and reduced economic opportunities,” Markell told me yesterday.

Or as PBS NewsHour has put it: “Contraceptives allow women greater control of whether and when to become mothers. As a result, they improve women’s ability to invest in their education and careers, which can have a positive impact on lifelong earnings.”

In a Times story last year, Margot Sanger-Katz described the program that Delaware has created:

When a woman of childbearing age goes to the doctor in most places, she gets standard queries about her smoking, drinking, seatbelt use and allergies. In Delaware, she is now also asked: ‘Do you want to get pregnant in the next year?’ If her answer is no, clinics are being trained to ensure she gets whatever form of birth control she wants that very day, whether a prescription or an implant in her arm. … Working with an organization called Upstream, Delaware has rolled out the program to nearly every medical provider in the state over the past three years. It’s having big effects on the number of women requesting and receiving contraception.

There is still a lot of room for progress, though — especially in states that have not been as ambitious about expanding access to IUDs.

For more …

“The 2017 abortion rate of 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 represented an 8 percent decline from 2014,” Rachel K. Jones, Elizabeth Witwer and Jenna Jerman of the Guttmacher Institute have written. About 18 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion in 2017.