You might be shocked to learn that family planning makes
much more sense than telling unmarried poor women not to have sex. A new report
from the well-respected Guttmacher Institute has discovered that publicly funded
family planning services save the government billions of dollars a year. According
to a report co-author, “every dollar spent on [family planning] saves taxpayers
$4 in costs associated with unintended births to mothers eligible for
Medicaid-funded natal care.”
Apparently, this is old news to the majority of
policymakers, since 27 states have already opted to extend family planning
services to low-income women who don’t otherwise qualify for Medicaid.
Unfortunately, Democrats stripped the stimulus bill of a
section that would have expanded family planning services to poor women, caving
to Republican opposition. Anti-abortion activist Troy Newman of Operation
Rescue called the proposal a "shameful population control program that
targeted low-income families." How exactly does giving women the option of choosing when to
have kids constitute population control?
This guy might have a point if the program was going to make
abortions for poor women mandatory. Actually, government-funded family planning
programs substantially (and entirely predictably) reduce the number of abortions. According
to MSNBC, “Without publicly funded family planning, it [the report] said, the U.S.
abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher, and nearly twice as high among
poor women.”
Apparently, taxpayers like Newman would prefer to pay for
abortions than to allow a young woman the option of waiting until she's ready
for kids before becoming pregnant. No doubt Newman would argue that women should not be having sex until they are ready for kids. But considering
that evangelical teens have far more unsafe sex than the rest of their peers, it’s clear
that abstinence-only sexual education is no match for the innate biological impulse to have sex.
Photo: Jezebel
