According to the nonprofit Population Institute, The United States gets a grade of “C-” for its efforts to promote family planning and reproductive health. According to its “Report Card on Reproductive Health and Rights,” the country does a poor job of assisting its residents in obtaining essential family planning resources.
The Report, released last year, gave nine states a grade of “F” while only 12 got a “B-” or better. Only Washington, Oregon, and California earned an “A”.
What do all these letters mean? Reproductive health, as measured by the institute, is determined by four criteria, each broken down into sub-categories:
- Effectiveness (30 percent):
- Affordability (30 percent);
- Prevention (20 percent);
- Clinic access (20 percent).
Effectiveness consists of teenage pregnancy rate and unintended pregnancies.
Affordability consists of Medicaid availability for family planning, insurance that covers contraception, and funding for family planning clinics for low-income families.
Prevention is broken down into two criteria: mandated school sex education and access to emergency contraception.
The fourth criterion, clinic access, consists of abortion restrictions and protective legislation for clinic access.
Title X (Title Ten) passed by Congress and approved by President Richard Nixon in 1970, provided low-income and uninsured individuals with access to family planning resources like birth control and preventive healthcare services. As a result, tens of millions of women who might not otherwise have had the option of limiting or spacing their pregnancies have been able to do so.
“We’ve seen a lot of progress in the last four decades,” said Population Institute President Robert Walker in the report, “but we can’t take anything for granted.” Recent events, like legislation in Texas that restricts abortion clinics by requiring untenable operating requirements, concerns Walker. These
include such restrictions as requiring the clinic to be near a hospital or to have expensive budget-busting equipment in the clinic that would exceed any reasonable need for such facilities. “The U.S. still has an unacceptably high rate of unintended pregnancies, including teenage pregnancies, and yet family planning clinics in many areas are being forced to close, and schools in many states are using unproven, abstinence-only sex education curricula.”
Fairness dictates we concede that some of the criteria employed in determining these grades are biased against those with religious beliefs that eschew abortion rights. But that still leaves a wide swath of heads-in-the-sand thinking in states that make it difficult to obtain abortions and are hostile to the availability of family planning. Among the most contemptible of these nexuses occurs when states like Texas attempt to close down Planned Parenthood locations because they provide abortions. The irony is that more than 95 percent of Planned Parenthood funding goes for services designed to help people avoid or plan pregnancies.
According to Walker, the United States has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. So while Texas (with a grade of D-) and New Jersey (C) have slashed state funding for family planning clinics serving low income uninsured folks, access to food stamps and unemployment insurance benefits are being hacked on the federal level as well. In other words, some families will grow larger while their ability to feed their most vulnerable members, the kids, will diminish.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2011 state legislators introduced about 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions. Of those, 135 became law, tightening restrictions in 36 states.
Let’s give this all some perspective. State legislatures dominated by conservatives tend to oppose the funding of family planning facilities, especially those that offer abortion or the so-called morning after pill. They also oppose generous contraception policies for teenage girls. These same legislatures frequently oppose health care reform, Medicaid and other benefits for those in the lower economic strata. Combine that with cutbacks in food stamps, and these states are whipping up a recipe for ipecac soup.
Whether or not you believe that reduced population is a good thing, how can these anti-reproductive-health cohorts believe that their policies, or lack of them, are a good thing? Read more about these issues in our book, Enough of Us.