In their effort to implement cuts to the fiscal year 2011 budget, House Republicans have targeted Title X funding, which provides Planned Parenthood and 4,500 community-based reproductive health and family planning clinics nationwide with funds for their services.
Legislation introduced by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) seeks to deny federal funds to any organization that performs abortions. Pence explicitly named Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of reproductive health services—including abortions—as the target of the bill.
Abortion foes zeroing in on the Title X family planning program can contend the allowance of federal funds for abortion and birth control on moral grounds. However, to wipe out the budget for Planned Parenthood and the 4,500 community-based, Title X-funded clinics would deny millions of men and women access to the free and low-cost health care services those organizations provide, such as breast and cervical cancer screenings, STI and HIV testing, birth control and health education.
Those services, among others, comprise the majority of visits to Planned Parenthood. Abortions account for a small fraction of the organization’s services.
President Richard Nixon signed Title X into law in 1970, offering a bipartisan and common sense approach to family planning that sought to ensure that low-income families would have access to free or affordable reproductive and preventive health services.
Planned Parenthood, founded in 1916 by birth control activist Margaret Sanger, her sister and a friend, has played a pivotal role in the last 95 years by advocating for laws allowing greater access to contraception—such as the birth control pill—and a woman’s right to choose in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case.
Recent videos released by Live Action—an anti-abortion activist group—depicted undercover attempts by members posing as a pimp and an underage prostitute trying to solicit advice from Planned Parenthood workers in obtaining services for girls apparently forced into the sex trade.
Shockingly, a New Jersey Planned Parenthood manager apparently advised the pair on lying about ages and occupations, and was promptly fired. Live Action undertook 11 other operations in different states, but no other recorded wrongdoing has been uncovered.
The local Planned Parenthood branches reported the incidents to the national organization, which then contacted the FBI. However, the New Jersey incident gave abortion foes the necessary momentum to call for a congressional rescinding of funds to any organizations that “aids and abets the sexual abuse and prostitution of minors.”
Surely, the New Jersey manager’s conduct was deplorable, but such behavior should not be declared indicative of the organization as a whole, but it is. Rather than punitively targeting Planned Parenthood, more oversight should be maintained and training issued to its workers to ensure that no illegal and unethical practices take place.
Should Live Action succeed in eliminating Title X funds, and, by extension, Planned Parenthood, the almost 2 million women who rely on the organization and community clinics for their family planning and medical care a year will find themselves with no alternative. Those who seek to kill the programs have offered none.
By providing family help and non-emergency medical care for those Americans with or without insurance, and from any income level, Planned Parenthood helps to keep people out of the emergency room. Their free and low-cost services, stripped of funding, would likely be forced to operate by charging patients high costs.
Thus, those who stand to lose the most from the campaign against Title X-funded programs would be those Americans already struggling with the ever-rising costs of health care.
Is it fiscally responsible to deny unemployed or uninsured women free or inexpensive access to pap smears, pelvic exams, pregnancy testing and counseling, basic infertility services, and cancer screenings?
In recent years, a shift in sex education for teenagers has seen the focus on comprehensive education cast aside in favor of abstinence-only programs. Given the undeniably high rates of teen sexuality—not to mention teen pregnancy, where the U.S. ranks higher than any other industrialized nation—is it realistic to expect young people to deny natural urges?
Does removing young people’s access to facilities offering safe sex education and testing sound like fiscal responsibility?
Millions of Americans oppose abortion because of deeply held moral convictions. Certainly, while we respect a woman’s right to choose, we would never want to find ourselves in the position of a country like Russia, where abortion serves as a primary method of birth control due to inadequate education on reproductive health and the inability to obtain safe, legal services in the event of unwanted pregnancy.
Congress should consider carefully the implications of cutting off funding to Title X-funded programs. It is difficult to accept that the measures proposed are simply a matter of cost-cutting and not ideological warfare waged on the backs of women’s rights and welfare.
