Women’s Health Care is on the Line Again as the GOP led Congress Revives Their Assault on Birth Control Access

Here we go again in the war against birth control. Yes, in 2015 a large contingent of lawmakers in Congress apparently won’t rest until all low-income women and families are unable to get birth control.

The House of Representatives recently voted for a bill that would completely eliminate funding for the nation’s Title X Family Planning Program, the latest brazen attack on women’s health care by extreme conservatives. This is especially stunning when you consider that Title X was passed during the Nixon Administration and was strongly supported by both sides of the aisle.

But House Republicans have been trying to zero out funding for family planning since 2011, when they threatened to shut down the federal government over the issue.  Thankfully, the House proposal to eliminate Title X has been amended in the Senate to cut the program by 10 percent. Even those cuts would increase the number of unplanned pregnancies by more than 82,000 next year.

The proposed bill would also cut the very successful Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program by a whopping 80 percent. Absurdly, it would quadruple funding for medically inaccurate “abstinence-only education” – which several national studies have shown to be ineffective.

Is this happening now because attacking access to birth control can be insidiously associated with abortion rights, an issue which can always be counted upon to galvanize the right-wing base? In the last four years, more than 213 new restrictions on abortion were enacted across the country– more than the total during the previous decade.

But how do you lower the abortion rate by cutting off all affordable access to birth control?

To be clear, there is little chance that these proposals will make it past the President’s veto pen. Still, regressive lawmakers have proven to be relentless.

The fact is, eliminating Title X would be devastating for women and families. Studies have shown that women who are forced to carry unintended pregnancies to term are more likely to be living beneath the poverty line and less likely to have a full-time job.

Meanwhile, the Title X program has been working. California, and the Bay Area, specifically, has seen the rates of unintended teen pregnancies drop in the last decade, thanks in large part to an increase in the use of more effective contraceptives and programs funded by the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program.

Not only is it a virtual guarantee that cutting this program would lead to more abortions, but those who can’t find affordable long-term birth control will be at far greater risk of continuing in a vicious cycle of poverty. That’s the real public expense of this “cost-saving” proposal.

Lupe Rodriguez is Public Affairs director of the South Bay region of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and chair of the Santa Clara County Commission on the Status of Women.

 
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