Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care in the United States and globally. This organization helps women, helps families, and helps reduce abortion rates and unintended pregnancies. The nonprofit organization directly provides a variety of reproductive health services and sexual education; contributes to research in reproductive technology and advocates for the protection and expansion of reproductive rights.
A coalition of national and local pro-life groups has lobbied federal and state governments to stop funding Planned Parenthood. As a result, federal and state legislators have proposed legislation to reduce funding levels. In recent years, several states have considered legislation to defund family planning services, although little is known about how these cuts affect teen pregnancy.
Miami University economics professor Analisa Packham has published a new study called “Family Planning Funding Cuts and Teen Childbearing” in the Journal of Health Economics. She tried to find a link between the defunding family planning services and the number of unintended pregnancies and teen abortions. The data showed that, instead of reducing abortion rates, reducing family planning funding levels leads to increased abortion rates.
“Texas politicians have pointed to a reduction in teen birth rates and abortion rates in recent years as affirmation for defunding family planning clinics. However, the fact that teen birth rates fell significantly across the US over the same time period suggests that other factors likely contributed to the decline.
Although the primary stated objective of the funding cuts was to decrease abortion incidence, I find little evidence that reducing family planning funding achieved this goal… The results indicate that the funding cuts increased abortion rates by 4.9 percent 1-2 years after the funding cuts and 3.1 percent over three years.”
According to a Guttmacher Institute analyses from 2015, nearly all unintended pregnancies are attributable to women who do not use contraception or use it inconsistently, implying that funding cuts to family planning clinics may indirectly increase unintended pregnancy rates through its effect on contraception use.
“And while no federally funded family planning clinic may legally provide abortion services, Texas, as well as four other states-New Jersey, Montana, New Hampshire, and Maine-have recently enacted measures to limit spending for family planning services, with many states considering similar legislation (Cadei, 2015),” the study reads. Women seeking to terminate their pregnancies sometimes resort to unsafe methods, particularly when access to legal abortion is restricted. This is particularly present in the poorer layers of the population. Women may attempt to self-abort or rely on another person who does not have proper medical training or access to proper facilities. This has a tendency to lead to severe complications, such as incomplete abortion, sepsis, hemorrhage, and damage to internal organs. That’s why defunding Planned Parenthood is not a good idea at all.
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