Washington, like many other states, is grappling with a state budget that has been cut to the bone and still isn’t balanced. What to do? Gov Christine Gregoire’s latest proposal recommends cutting $1.8 million in family planning funding from the budget. This comes on top of a $2.25 million cut to the same programs in 2011, which eliminated services for 7,500 low-income women in our state and increased state-covered pregnancy care costs by $9 million.
Simple math tells us we save more than $4 for each $1 spent on family planning. According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 41,000 publicly-funded births in Washington in 2006 at a cost of $254 million. About half of these births resulted from unintended pregnancies.
Cutting funds for family planning for low-income women means more publicly funded pregnancies and births. And unlike the outcomes attributed to other budget cuts, we have proof nine months later. It only takes 115 new unintended pregnancies to wipe out $1 million in short-term “savings” from family planning cuts.
At Planned Parenthood, we think it makes sense to keep funding these essential services. That is why, instead of continuing to try to cut our way out of this budget mess, we hope legislators will look at some ways to generate new revenue to protect the social safety net. Cuts to important, preventive health care services are ones we simply cannot afford.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. We know the outcomes for unintended pregnancy are worse by nearly every measure. Women with unintended pregnancies are: more likely to be poor, more likely to experience post-partum depression, less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, more likely to have pre-term and low-birth weight babies and more likely to have children with a host of developmental challenges
Beyond the cost of human suffering, there are real dollars and cents costs associated with all of these issues, many of which are borne by the state. Family planning offers real hope for people to plan their futures in a way that makes children and families healthy, and saves taxpayer dollars.