Highlights of Guttmacher Report: "Next Steps for America's Family Planning Program"
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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
This page last updated May 2, 2009 12:39 .