Pro-life advocates should hold fundraisers for family planning providers, such as Planned Parenthood, not lobby to defund them. Access to family planning, including effective contraception, has been shown to reduce abortions. This isn't complicated. Increasing family planning services reduces the number of unintended pregnancies, which reduces the number of abortions. Decreasing family planning services increases unintended pregnancies, which increases abortions, as well as maternal deaths, and infant and child deaths. Public health policies that increase family planning make moral as well as fiscal sense, as unintended pregnancies come at a cost to taxpayers. Ultimately, cutting family planning services creates the very problem pro-life advocates seek to eliminate.
If you want to reduce the number of abortions, you must reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. According to a 2011 study, 43 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. (Intended pregnancies account for approximately 4% of abortions.) In their 2008 abortion surveillance report, the Centers for Disease Control recommends that "providing women with the knowledge and resources necessary to make decisions about their sexual behavior and use of contraception can help them avoid unintended pregnancies and thus reduce the number of women seeking abortion."
Indeed, when women are able to access and taught to correctly use contraception, the Guttmacher Institute estimates the percent of unintended pregnancies plummets to 5 percent. A lack of available family planning services, however, continues to disproportionately punish the poor. Though most subgroups of women experienced decreases in abortion between 2000 and 2008, the abortion rate among poor women increased by 17.5 percent, as their rate of unintended pregnancy climbed to more than five times greater than high-income women.
Funding family planning is not only good public health policy to reduce abortions; it is also good fiscal policy. Women who are uninsured or underinsured depend on publicly-funded family planning through Medicaid and the Title X Family Planning program, which was established by President Nixon and a bipartisan Congress in 1970. Mitt Romney argues that slashing Title X will slash spending. The opposite is true. The Center on Children and Families of the Brookings Institution estimates that the annual cost of unintended pregnancies is between $9.6 and $12.6 billion. Preventing unintended pregnancies, according to the Center's researchers, will save taxpayers as much as $6.2 billion. As a counter-example to Romney's vision, California's Family Planning, Access, Care, and Treatment (PACT) Program provides publicly-funded family planning services, including contraception. In 2007, Family PACT helped women avert an estimated 296,200 unintended pregnancies and 122,200 abortions, which corresponds to an estimated total-cost savings of $1.88 billion (from conception until age two) and $4.05 billion (from conception to age five).
When family planning programs are eliminated, the outcome is hardly "pro-life." Linda Whiteford, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida, has written about the consequences of withholding $170 million over five years (2001-2006) from the international family planning initiative of the United Nations Population Fund. The results of this "pro-life" policy, according to Whiteford, were "10 million unwanted pregnancies, 4 million induced abortions, 23,500 maternal deaths, [and] 385,000 infant and children deaths." On the other hand, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers have shown that increasing family planning and contraceptive use has decreased maternal deaths by 40 percent in developing countries by reducing unintended pregnancies and, thus, reducing high-risk pregnancies and increasing space between pregnancies. Family planning initiatives are pro-life initiatives.
When politicians threaten to get rid of family planning services, including Planned Parenthood, they threaten to increase unintended pregnancies and abortions. Planned Parenthood's core service is providing effective and consistent contraception. In 2010, contraception accounted for 33.5 percent of Planned Parenthood's affiliate medical services. By providing family planning services to nearly 2.2 million patients, Planned Parenthood estimates averting approximately 584,000 unintended pregnancies and 277,000 abortions. Nearly 50 percent of Planned Parenthood's patients relied on Medicaid, which provides 75 percent of public funding for family planning. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, however, Paul Ryan's proposal to turn Medicaid into a state-controlled block grant would jeopardize the ability of poor women to access health care services. We know already that poor women are exposed to a high risk for unintended pregnancy and abortion. Cutting access to family planning, and rejecting the CDC's recommendations, only undermines the pro-life agenda at both a heavy fiscal and moral cost.
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The real target of the anti-abortion crowd is sex. To them sex is an evil necessity for the propagation of the species, but should never be indulged for pleasure. Unwanted children have long been the perceived punishment for extra-marital sex, and the teavangelicals do not want scientific progress to remove this deterrent to human enjoyment of our sexuality. Teavangelicals believe we are here to suffer and prove our piousness to a vengeful god. Any diversion from that edict must originate from satan as he is the provider of all pleasurable temptation.
1) Control over sex. The people who run the anti-choice movement have very firm ideas about sex, including when and how it should be done. In short, they think the only people who should be having sex are those who are married and having sex for procreative purposes.
2) And if you do have sex for non-procreative purposes, these policies are designed to punish you (particularly if you're a woman). I'm sure you've heard anti-choice people say that pregnancy is a "consequence" for sex, and anyone who partakes of it should, therefore, deal with the consequences. This is, in other words, punishment for people straying from the "approved" form of sexual conduct.
3) All of this, of course, leads to a greater reliance on the traditional family structure, which the anti-choice activists ultimately want to see happen. If people cannot have sex without having children, this leaves most people (again, especially women) with very few options than to either not have sex (which would defy the very basics of human biology) or participate in the traditional structure where men work, women stay at home, and babies continue to happen.
This isn't about babies -- it's about sex and control.
Oh, there isn't one, they just want control of women and our reproduction.
Pregnancy , abortion and disease are things that can be avoided when using the appropriate birth control
Why is this so hard to accept.
Prior to DNA testing, the only way to insure a woman's child was yours, was to control her ability to have sex. It's why some in Islam countries put their women behind figurative bars, and why people here don't want women to have sex without the repercussions of pregnancy.
They may not even admit to themselves that is what is driving this, but it is fundimentally about control
If it were about unwanted pregnancies going down, they'd advocate more assistance, more education. If it were about "life", they'd have programs to take care of the born babies.
it's simply about control.
For me, a big question surrounding the "pro-life" movement is the conceptualization of the fetus. The fetus, which some people on this board have referred to as a child and baby, is the central character of the entire movement. In terms of women's health (physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental), this is problematic. The fetus is at the center of the controversy-- not the woman (or girl). I think it's becoming increasingly important for people to recognize that the personified fetus-- be it labeled "baby" or "bundle of cells"-- is a cultural construction-- a powerful cultural construction that facilitates hostilities between "pro-lifers" and "pro-choicers." In this country, conceptualizations of the fetus are pretty strictly divided. This constructed and largely artificial schism, between pro-life/pro-choice, does not allow for productive conversation about health, well-being, and sexual intimacy. The fetus has been both glorified and demonized-- in order to provide people, especially women, with the best healthcare possible, we need to recognize that conversations are currently orbiting around a culturally constructed character: Hardacre's "menacing fetus" seems appropriate.
Anyways, Jason, proud to be working with you. Keep up the good work. -Zoe
Because as a women, what it 'is" does not matter as much as my right to control my own body and who uses it. To me, forced pregnancy of a child, or a zygote is akin to rape or slavery. if i cannot decide who lives inside of me and when, then what decisions can I make. the single most fundamental thing I can control is the use of my body, right?
But you make a strong point that the Right will never accept my position, cause of that cute little baby there.
However, we can't just stop the tide of self-destructive personal behavior with a birth control pill. They do nothing to prevent STDs. Without adding a responsible moral component, describing any sex as "safe" is completely misleading.
"...describing any sex as 'safe' is completely misleading"
It is better to be termed as "saf-ER sex" not 'safe sex.' This implies people are using ways to protect themselves. It is also multi-faceted: 1. protection against pregnancy and 2. protection against STDs. Like I said before, BC pills/patches/etc are not intended to protect against STDs, so the primary goal of HBC is to prevent pregnancy, that's all. Some people have frequent testing, and some people screen their potential partners before proceeding to have sex with them.
Another issue I have with your comment is you injected 'responsible moral component.' Are you saying people who have premarital sex are irresponsible and immoral?
Sex no matter what you marital status is not "immoral" per se. What IS both immoral and irresponsible is having sex and expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill for the result.