"Family Planning: Critical Safety Net in Hard Times"

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Rachel Benson Gold
Director of Policy Analysis
The Guttmacher Institute

Federal dollars invested in family planning is “smart government at its best,” asserts Rachel Benson Gold, the lead author of a 2009 report from the venerable Guttmacher Institute. “Publicly funded family planning is basic health care that empowers disadvantaged women to decide for themselves when to become pregnant and how many children to have,” she adds. “It reduces recourse to abortion. And it saves significant amounts of taxpayer money.” Don’t miss  “Family Planning: Critical Safety Net in Hard Times” for Ms. Gold’s succinct rundown of the high points of her report.

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The Guttmacher report, "Next Steps for America's Family Planning Program," highlights important facts about national effort to provide reproductive health care to all U.S. women in needNext Steps.

  • Currently 9 million women depend on publicly sub sized family planning care.
  • But the number of women in need has ballooned in recent years and is swelling further with current economic downturn.
  • About half of U.S. pregnancies—more than three million each year—are unintended, and by age 45, more than half of all American women will have experienced an unintended pregnancy.
  • After years of progress in reducing income and racial disparities in contraceptive use, some of these gaps have widened again. Disparities in unintended pregnancy rates are also pronounced and growing worse.
  • Barriers to access to family planning are particularly salient for those without stable and sufficient personal resources. Four in 10 poor women of reproductive age are uninsured, and 17.5 million American women need publicly supported contraceptive services.
 


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Ms. Gold notes that the return on investment of federal dollars in family planning is remarkable:

  • One in four women who obtain contraceptive services—including half of poor women—do so at a publicly In America we have a long history of "enabling women and couples to better control the number and timing of their pregnancies. [This] led to the establishment in 1970 of the Title X family planning program. Two years later, Congress required states to cover family planning under Medicaid." [See further in the full report.]funded center.
  • One in six women who obtain a Pap test or a pelvic exam do so at a family planning center.
  • Federally subsidized health centers provide the requisite services to one-third of women who have an HIV test or who receive counseling, testing or treatment for other sexually transmitted infections.
  • So important are the services offered to needy women at these clinics that six in ten of these women consider the clinic their primary source of health care.

Since 98% of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, Ms. Gold says, it is imperative that we separate highly charged abortion politics from our commitment to ensure basic reproductive health care to all American women and their families. Short of achieving that goal, we will continue to be beset by disturbingly high rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity.

  • The perilously high rates of abortion in this country (by comparison to most European countries) can be directly linked to our failure to make comprehensive reproductive health care as accessible to the poor as to the rich in our communities.teens
  • Similarly our distressingly high rate of teen pregnancy, with its terrible impact on public health, economic well-being and education, will fall only when our young women can obtain safe, culturally sensitive, high quality health care close to home.
  • And the dollars and cents speak for themselves: $4 is saved for every $1 invested contraceptive care. |MORE

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The linkages between family planning care and economic wellbeing are replete.

agingpensiveFor instance, Ms. Gold makes the point in the course of her televised interview that young women aging out of foster care benefit very strongly from the health care available to them through Title X clinics which gives them the basic financial stability to begin to support themselves. This theme is picked up in the 4-8-09 New York Times article: "Too Old for Foster Care, and Facing the Recession."

Contrarian assertions continue to consume media attention.

See further: "Parroting Propaganda on Family Planning"

 

For further reliable information on family planning in America:

 

Brief Bio of Rachel Benson Gold

Rachel Benson Gold joined the staff of the Guttmacher Institute in 1979 and currently holds the position of Director of Policy Analysis and Washington Office Operations in the Institute's Public Policy Division. Her expertise is on the role of the public and private sectors in financing reproductive health care. Ms. Gold is the author of several reports and articles in the field of reproductive health and recently completed an analysis of the critical role of Medicaid in providing publicly funded family planning services.

She is lead author of the Guttmacher Institute's major 2009 report, "Next Steps for America’s Family Planning Program," which is the subject of the April 2009 Future Choices' program, "Family Planning: Critical Safety Net in Hard Times."

Ms. Gold serves on the Board of Directors of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. She earned a Master of Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University in 1979 and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Government from Wesleyan University in 1977. |MORE

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This page last updated May 4, 2009 6:07 .