The Effect of Defunding Planned Parenthood on Low-income Women

​

Investment to make birth control affordable and accessible must become a national priority.  Access to birth control empowers young women to live their lives with intention and to avoid unwanted pregnancy.  This investment can lead to lower overall government medical costs, reducing costs associated with pregnancies, delivering a child, child care costs, and costs associated with abortions. In addition, greater birth control access empowers women by giving them control of their educational and economic future. Therefore, affordable birth control should be provided by Planned Parenthood with funding from Medicaid.

Providing women with affordable and accessible birth control will prevent unintended and unwanted pregnancies, therefore, reducing abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute in 2011, 45% of pregnancies in the United States were unintended. Unintended pregnancies consist of mistimed or unwanted pregnancies and are most concentrated among those least able to bear the costs. In fact, over 11% of pregnancies among women below the federal poverty level in 2011 were unintended. That is a figure more than five times the rate (2%) of women with incomes of at least 200% of the federal poverty level (Guttmacher Institute).  Therefore, providing birth control to women least able to pay themselves will decrease the rate of unintended and unwanted pregnancies and decrease the abortion rate. For example, in 2011, 42% of unintended pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) ended in an abortion, while 58% ended in birth (Guttmacher Institute). If women who can’t afford birth control are provided with affordable and accessible birth control, unintended pregnancies will decrease therefore abortions will decrease. On the other hand, if a woman can’t afford birth control she simply will not be able to afford raising a child, therefore, providing poor women with birth control will reduce the number of women who can’t afford raising a child.

If women are provided with affordable birth control this will lower costs for the government overall, for example, as of now the government has to pay for costs associated to pregnancies and delivering a child, child care costs, and costs associated with women having abortions. “A study by investigators at Washington University reports that providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduces unplanned pregnancies and cuts abortion rates by a range of 62 to 78 percent compared to the national rate,” (Williams).  Unplanned pregnancies leads to high costs that fall heavily on government. Inexpensive or free birth control cuts the abortion rate and pays back in the long run. “Two-thirds (68%) of the 1.5 million unplanned births that occurred in 2010 were paid for by public insurance programs, primarily Medicaid. By comparison, just 38% of planned births were funded by these programs,” (Williams). In addition, “The U.S. and state governments saved $13.6 billion in 2010 and it is estimated that for every $1 invested in family planning programs, federal and state governments save $7.09 in part because of unintended pregnancies that were prevented from publicly supported contraception” (Planned Parenthood). Therefore, if the government invests in birth control, they will save on costs associated with medical care for pregnancies, costs associated with delivering a child, child care, and abortions because the government will only have to pay for the birth control itself. 

 Perhaps most importantly, affordable birth control helps raise women and children out of poverty. Federally funded family planning programs are associated with significant reductions in both child and adult poverty. A study of the long-term effects of access to contraception found that individuals born in the years immediately after the federal family planning programs started were less likely to live in poverty in childhood and adulthood (Planned Parenthood). The government benefits from preventing unintended pregnancy because it helps prevent women from going into poverty in the first place.

Providing women with affordable and accessible birth control empowers women educationally and in the workplace (Planned Parenthood). Women without a high school degree had the highest unintended pregnancy rate in 2011 (73 per 1,000), and rates continually drop with more years of education (Guttmacher Institute).  Being able to get “the Pill” before age 21 is the most influential factor in enabling women already in college to stay in college (Planned Parenthood). College enrollment was 20 percent higher among women who could access the birth control pill legally by age 18 in 1970, compared with women who could not, and women who could access “the Pill” before having to decide whether to pursue higher education obtained an average of about one year more of education before age 30 (Planned Parenthood). Young women’s legal access to the pill before age 21 led to a 2.3% increase in the women who were college graduates, and young women with legal pill access were more able to both have children and pursue higher education (Planned Parenthood). Between 1969 and 1980, the dropout rate among women with access to the pill was 35 percent lower than women without access to the pill (Planned Parenthood). As much as one-third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s are the result of access to oral contraceptives (Planned Parenthood).  The decrease in the gender wage gap among 25–49-year-olds “would have been 10 percent smaller in the 1980s and 30 percent smaller in the 1990s” in the absence of widespread legal birth control access (Planned Parenthood). Birth control has been estimated to account for more than 30 percent of the increase in the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990 (Planned Parenthood). Affordable and accessible birth control is very important to women’s continued economic advancement and self-sufficiency.