While Valérie Pécresse denies having removed the Contraception Pass for those under 20 in Île-de-France, the Minister of Health on Thursday called the signal “disastrous”.
“I call on Valérie Pécresse, who seems to want to make prevention a strong orientation, not to give up acting in the direction of young girls, young women,” said Marisol Touraine this Thursday morning on France Inter. The Minister of Health, who said she was “concerned” by the abolition of the Contraception Pass in Île-de-France, even went so far as to qualify the signal as “disastrous”.
In this story, the new president of the Ile-de-France region is accused of attacking the now famous “Pass Contraception”, a kind of booklet made up of detachable coupons intended for young people under 20 years old, allowing access anonymous and free for a year for the pill, gynecological consultations, HIV screening… During the last regional council, on April 7, this pass was removed, the newspaper revealed Marianne Wednesday April 13. The reason ? A device too expensive and little used.
An empty shell according to Valérie Pécresse
The budget devoted to this pass in Ile-de-France by the team of socialist Jean-Paul Huchon amounted to 20,000 euros in 2014 as in 2015. “For 500 public high schools, that’s 40 euros per high school, ie 4 cents per high school student, “calculated Valérie Pécresse, denouncing a low recourse among young people during the” socialist mandate “.
The booklet was therefore only distributed to 2,000 people, in total, in the Ile-de-France region. “These 20,000 euros were entered in the budget but not spent. There is a double talk: that which one holds in the hemicycles and in the media (…) and there is the reality of the speeches and the actions ”, again tackled the new president. And according to her, in the last two years, no contraception Pass has been distributed. De facto, the device has not existed for two years, according to the team. “Believing that we are doing away with something that benefits high school students is the gross manipulation of the left” plague the entourage of Valérie Pécresse, according to France Inter.
A device not well known enough
Nothing to celebrate, however, because beyond the symbol and despite low use, the Contraception Pass is one of the solutions that reduce the costs of contraception and promote sexual health, as shown. an IGAS report (Inspectorate General of Social Affairs) of April 2015 devoted to “free and confidential access to contraception for minors”.
The report points to the lack of efficiency of the device, which does not “today allow all minors to be reached, especially since it remains little known to the general public”.
However, far from recommending a deletion, the document underlines the lack of information and publicity around the device. Perhaps this is where we should have acted – but politics sometimes has its reasons that reason ignores …
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