Results tagged “guttmacher institute” from Buzz
Great news from the Guttmacher Institute this week – it seems that publicly funded planning clinics have a positive impact on our entire community, preventing nearly 2 million unplanned pregnancies and almost 1 million abortions each year.
Wow. Them’s big numbers.
And since we are all freaking out about the economy these days, how about a little good news? By avoiding unintended pregnancy and the associated medical costs, including prenatal, birth and postpartum care, family planning saves taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent on family planning.
Now, can you imagine the result of all family planning was publicly funded? If every woman and girl received free or very low cost birth control and other family planning services?
We’d have the same teen pregnancy rate as the Netherlands – 12 out of 1000 girls. Ours is 75 out of 1000 girls.
You can read the report yourself right here.
Great news from the Guttmacher Institute – the teen abortion rate has declined a whole bunch since 1974.
It’s dropped from 33% in 1974 to 17% in 2004. It took 30 years, but progress is progress, right?
The reason for the drop? Increased use of birth control and the availability of more effective methods. And for the record, the drop started before we had federally funded Abstinence Only programs, so we were already on the right track.
The only bad news in this good news is Black and Hispanic women obtain abortions at a rate 3 to 5 times higher than that of white women. Throw in a good dose of poverty, and the numbers increase.
Historically, these women are poorer and have less access to healthcare than the majority of white women – even white teenagers.
We need to think about what we can do to help young and poor women gain access to birth control. Voting for a candidate who sees the connections between poverty, access to birth control and abortion, is probably a good placed to start.
