‘Avoid the Stork’ campaign gives students tools to decide

A young couple is tangled in a romantic embrace when the sound of a baby's cry comes over the monitor.

The girl, who is baby-sitting, looks up to see a giant stork with a baby.

“Don't let the stork catch you off guard,” the announcer says. “Avoid the stork until you're ready for a delivery.”

The announcer then directs viewers to a website -www.avoidthestork.com- for more information on things like Stork Insurance, or birth control, and Package Problems, or sexually transmitted diseases.

The commercial is one of a half-dozen aimed at preventing unplanned pregnancies, particularly those for women ages 18 to 30.

It's a kitschy campaign presented by the Iowa Initiative for Unplanned Pregnancy and researchers from the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.

“The stork seems to have widespread appeal,” said Shelly Campo, an associate professor of community and health at the University of Iowa and one of a team of researchers involved in the Avoid the Stork campaign. “We knew the campaign was going to be focused on 18- to 30-year-olds and it was targeted in that direction.”

The campaign is part of a five-year, $5 million project funded by an anonymous donor. The final stages of the project are to run the campaign and compile data when it's over in April.

In a 15-year study started in 1991, researchers discovered that in the United States, nearly half of the pregnancies of women in that age group are unintended, Campo said.

“That includes unwanted pregnancies, the ‘I was done having kids,' as well as those that were mistimed, as the woman is finishing college or just getting started on a career,” she said.

Christie Vilsack was surprised by what she was hearing from college students as she toured Iowa as executive director of the Iowa Initiative for Unplanned Pregnancy.

“One of the things college students told me is that they've gone off to college without the tools to make life decisions,” she said.

Those “tools,” she said, are education about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

“I try to use numbers sparingly but when I learned that 61 percent of women who start community college and have a baby do not graduate, that really gets to the heart of the issue,” Vilsack said. “Your ability to have the career you want, your ability to support your family is diminished. We can help educate and support these women.”

The campaign isn't geared just to women, Campo said. One of the common things researchers were reminded of early on is that “it takes two.”

“Even though the prime focus is on women, we heard from a lot of women that it takes more than the woman to have an unintended pregnancy,” she said.

One commercial is focused just on the guys: the stork follows a man around his gym until his cell phone rings - and a woman tells him she's pregnant.

The commercials aren't the sole source of information or promotion, Campo said. Because the campaign is targeted at college-aged women researches had to determine where their audience would see the ads. There are billboards, commercials, newspaper and magazine ads as well as giveaways on both university campuses and at Kirkwood Community College and entertainment venues.