Terrifically important new research from our friends at the Guttmacher Institute on unplanned pregnancy. From the press release:
"Publicly funded family planning clinics provide contraceptive services to approximately seven million women each year. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States would be almost 50% higher. In other words, 1.4 million unintended pregnancies and 600,000 abortions are averted each year because of these services...
In addition to the clear benefits for individual women and their families in helping them avoid the pregnancies they do not want and plan the pregnancies they do, the analysis finds that these services save $4.3 billion in public funds. Nationally, for every $1.00 spent to provide services in the nationwide network of publicly funded family planning clinics, $4.02 in Medicaid expenses on births are averted."
I'm interested to know how they can come to this conclusion. How do they know that these women would have gotten pregnant without their help? Maybe the women would have stopped having sex, which would have prevented a greater spread of STDs; maybe they would've bought their own contraceptives, saving the taxpayers a lot of money. I just don't think this research has any validity because there is no way to say if a woman "would have" gotten pregnant or had an abortion. It is misleading.