Sarah Brown

National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

Sarah Brown is the CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen
and Unplanned
Pregnancy, a
private and independent non-profit organization working to promote values,
behavior, and policies that reduce both teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancy
among young adults.  Before helping to
found the Campaign, Brown was a senior study director at the Institute of Medicine, where she directed numerous
studies in the broad field of maternal and child health. Her last major report
there resulted in the landmark book The
Best Intentions: Unintended Pregnancy and the Well-being of Children and
Families
. She has served on advisory boards of many influential national
organizations, including the Guttmacher
Institute
, the Population Advisory Board of the David and Lucile Packard
Foundation, the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists
, the DC Mayor’s Committee on Reducing Teenage Pregnancies and
Out-of Wedlock Births, and Teen People magazine. She holds an undergraduate
degree from Stanford University and a Masters in Public Health degree from
the University of
North Carolina.

Brown has received numerous awards, including the Institute
of Medicine’s Cecil Award for Excellence in Research, the John MacQueen Award
for Excellence in Maternal and Child Health from the Association of Maternal
and Child Health Programs, the Harriet Hylton Barr Distinguished Service Award
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Martha May Elliot
Award of the American Public Health Association, and the Spirit of Service
Award from the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and
Prevention.

Courting Common Ground

In the struggle over abortion and, more recently, abstinence-only education, attention has strayed away from what the CDC recognizes as one of the 10 greatest public health advances of the 20th century- modern methods of family planning.

Bravo, President Obama

President Obama's budget contains the first-ever significant funding for preventing teen pregnancy prevention that is not dedicated to abstinence-only interventions.