The number of poor women who need contraception has gone up nearly a quarter. The number getting it has dropped JENNY KUTNER Between 2000 and 2012, the number of American women in need of publicly funded family planning services went up 22 percent. The number of women able to access those services did not. Instead, it declined, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. Recent estimates show that 20 million women qualify as “in need” of publicly funded contraception typically provided by Title X services, instituted decades ago to provide family planning assistance (because even Richard Nixon knew that accessible birth control is a good idea).But the ongoing partisan crusade against abortion providers, in which Title X programs have unfortunately been included, has left just over one fifth of qualifying patients covered. “The number of women needing publicly funded contraceptive services has skyrocketed over the last decade,” Rachel Gold, Guttmacher’s acting vice president for public policy, said in a statement. “Publicly funded family planning centers are safety-net providers — they are essential in enabling women to plan the pregnancies they want and avoid the ones that they don’t. But public funding sources — such as the federal Title X program and state revenues — are failing to keep pace with women’s growing needs.” In 2000, public clinics were able to provide coverage for just 41 percent of the low-income women who qualified for it; that number dropped ten percent by 2012, when Title X was able to serve just 4.3 million women. Despite the program’s inability to keep up with growing demand, it has still offered crucial assistance: Guttmacher credits public clinics with helping to avoid 1.5 million unintended pregnancies in 2012, which would have resulted in 741,000 unplanned births and 510,000 abortions. Title X health centers provided over 70 percent of those services, which kept the combined rate of unintended pregnancy, unplanned birth and abortion down by 44 percent. It also saved the U.S. a whole lot of money. The programs and coverage are crucial, but they simply cannot do enough given the booming number of women who need public assistance and the attacks on reproductive healthcare. As Think Progress notes, the number of women in need of public coverage for contraception has grown most at the same time that attacks on providers have escalated, posing huge threats to Title X: In the period between 2010 and 2012 alone — when attacks on publicly-funded clinics intensified — the number of poor adult women in need of contraceptive services increased by 12 percent. In Texas, where lawmakers’ crusade against abortion has undermined the entire family planning landscape over the past two years, this health care crisis is coming into sharp focus. Advocates are holding up the state as a negative example of what happens without Title X. It’s no wonder, then, that unintended pregnancies are increasingly becoming concentrated among low-income women who don’t have an adequate safety net to turn to. However, there aren’t very many good options for them after they become pregnant, either. Thanks to the federal policies that prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortion services, it’s typically difficult for those women to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket to end a pregnancy. And if they’re ultimately forced to give birth, they’re more likely to slip deeper into poverty. Of course, the very legislators attacking abortion providers and reproductive healthcare would cyclically argue that those women can simply access coverage through public programs. But as the Guttmacher findings show, Title X and similar programs can’t keep up. Millions of women are slipping through the cracks.
I've always been puzzled by the derision dumped by conservatives on welfare mothers with "all those children" and yet won't left a finger, much less allocate a dime, to help them avoid having those children in the first place. Perhaps some of the right-wing minds here can help clarify.
The only issue I have with your argument is that you ignore the person most responsible for the predicament in the first place - the woman who continues to have the children. Last I checked, getting pregnant isn't a communicable disease and requires a choice (several actually) to be made.
because some people are intelligent enough to separate things out... you are not going to stop people who want to get pregnant with govt paid for condoms. http://mises.org/econsense/ch13.asp ... The conservative organization Change-NY has recently issued a study of the economic incentives for going on, and staying on, welfare in New York. The "typical" welfare recipient is a single mother with two children. This typical welfare "client" receives, in city, state, and federal benefits, the whopping annual sum of $32,500, which includes approximately $3,000 in cash, $14,000 in Medicaid, $10,000 in housing assistance, and $5,000 in food assistance. Since these benefits are non-taxable, this sum is equivalent to a $45,000 annual salary before taxes. Furthermore, this incredibly high figure for welfare aid is "extremely conservative," says Change-NY, because it excludes the value of other benefits, including Head Start (also known as pre-school day care), job training (often consisting of such hard-nosed subjects as "conversational skills"), child care, and the Special Supplemental Food program for Women, Infants, and Children (or WIC). Surely, including all this would push up the annual benefit close to $50,000. This also presumes that the mother is not cheating by getting more welfare than she is entitled to, which is often the case. Not only is this far above any job available to our hypothetical teen-aged single mother, it is even far higher than a typical entry level job in the New York City government. Thus, The New York Post, (Aug. 2) noted the following starting salaries at various municipal jobs: $18,000 for an office aid; $23,000 for a sanitation worker; $27,000 for a teacher; $27,000 for a police officer or firefighter; $18,000 for a word processor--all of these with far more work skills than possessed by your typical welfare client. And all of these salaries, of course, are fully taxable.
http://mises.org/econsense/ch13.asp Given this enormous disparity in benefits, is it any wonder that 1.3 million mothers and children in New York are on welfare, andthat welfare dependence is happily passed on from one generation of girls to the next? As Change-NY puts it, "why accept a job that requires 40 hours of work a week when you can remain at home and make the equivalent" of $45,000 a year? Economists, then, are particularly alert to the fact that, the more any product, service, or condition is subsidized, the more of it we are going to get. We can have as many people on welfare as we are willing to pay for. If the state of being a single mother with kids is the fastest route to getting on welfare, that social condition is going to multiply. Not, of course, that every woman will fall for the blandishments of welfare, but the more intense those subsidies and the greater the benefit compared to working, the more women and illegitimate children on welfare we are going to be stuck with. Moreover, the longer this system remains in place, the worse will be the erosion in society of the work ethic and of the reluctance to be on the dole that used to be dominant in the United States. Once that ethical shift takes place, the welfare system will only snowball. Change-NY wryly points out that it would be cheaper for the taxpayer to send welfare recipients to Harvard than to maintain the current system. In view of the decline of educational standards generally and Harvard's Political Correctness in particular, Harvard would probably be happy to enroll them.
So those who are poor should avoid having sex? Of all the dumb suggestions you've made, this ranks near the very top.
You are, however, going to help people who don't want to get pregnant by providing contraceptives and by providing abortions to those who got pregnant anyway but don't want to carry to term. Next?
All I did was point out your complete and total removal of any blame on the shoulder of the individual who is making the choice. As usual, you hear what you want and take that to mean I think poor people shouldn't have sex. If we go back 50 years, were there as many unwanted pregnancies by the poor? I'm not talking about actual numbers, just percentages. Or were there, perhaps, better family planning and more conservative (social) views on what was acceptable? Could you get more in your welfare check for another kid? I wish I could say that your commentary ranked at the very top of all the dumb ass things you've brought up, but that's a very high bar to achieve.
How else are they going to avoid having unwanted children if they have no access to contraception/abortion? What difference does it make? You are again avoiding the question.