Studies: Family planning cuts lead to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions

Anti-abortion is an inherently incoherent stance: teen pregnancy and abortion are bad, so to combat them, let’s shut down the services and clinics that help educate teens about safe sex as well as provide contraception so they don’t get pregnant in the first place. That’ll show ’em. (It’s almost as if their belief weren’t based on evidence and logic or something.)

It’s obvious to anyone capable of thinking clearly that the more people have access to reproductive health centers and education (Planned Parenthood! Sex ed classes!), the lower the rates of accidental pregnancy, and thus, the fewer abortions. This was apparently a mystery to Texas legislators, who in 2011 slashed family planning services by over 60%, forcing more than 80 clinics to close. You can imagine their thinking: if there are fewer health centers that deal with teen pregnancies and abortions, then logically, there will be fewer teen pregnancies and abortions in the state! Because healthcare works by supply and demand, right?

Yet as research has now conclusively shown, not only were they dead wrong, the literal opposite is taking place. A new study in the Journal of Health Economics by a Miami University professor lays it out [my emphasis]:

The results indicate that the funding cuts increased abortion rates by 4.9 percent 1-2 years after the funding cuts and 3.1 percent over three years.

[…]

This paper analyzes the effects of defunding family planning services on teen birth rates. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I estimate that decreasing funding for family planning in Texas by 67 percent led to an increase in the teen birth rate by 3.4 percent. These effects were concentrated in the 2-3 years after the initial cuts and in counties with relatively high poverty rates. Although the primary stated objective of the funding cuts was to decrease abortion incidence, I find little evidence that reducing family planning funding achieved this goal.

The estimates suggest that nearly 2,200 teens would have not given birth absent the reduction in Texas family planning funding. Given that the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy estimates that the average cost of teen childbearing to taxpayers is nearly $27,000 per birth, the estimated costs of the reduction in family planning funding are $81 mil […] Therefore the costs of unintended pregnancy caused by the policy change outweigh the $73 million budget cuts.

In short: More teens are getting pregnant, they’re having more abortions, and it’s all costing the state more money. Sounds like a typical well-thought-out Republican policy to me.

Here’s a telling graph:

Notice how that line was on a steady downward path for years before the legislature decided to slash the budget. Abortions were already getting rarer in the state before lawmakers decided to mess it all up. It’s the definition of fixing what ain’t broken, except they’re the ones who broke it, turning a steadily improving situation and turning it on its head out of sheer dogmatic stupidity.

Wait, that just sounds like the usual Republican m.o., too.

This isn’t even the first study to focus on the state of things in Texas. A 2016 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed much the same thing, this one focusing on adults rather than teenagers:

The state of Texas’ sustained campaign against Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics affiliated with abortion providers appears to have led to an increase in births among low-income women who lost access to affordable and effective birth control, a new study says.

[…]

The researchers calculated that the relative increase in births was 27% for women who lost access to Planned Parenthood. Many of these births were probably unplanned, since the increase was only seen in counties where women faced new hurdles in access to contraception, the study authors wrote.

[…]

The study doesn’t prove that the change in Texas policy was directly responsible for the increase in births, the researchers noted. But after making it more difficult for women to get safe, reliable birth control, women switched to less reliable contraceptive methods, or skipped them altogether. The result is dozens of additional babies born to some of the thousands of women who had been served by the shuttered clinics.

The second study doesn’t mention abortion (or at least, the quoted report doesn’t), but it’s more or less guaranteed that more women of all ages are enduring more unwanted pregnancies and finding ways to terminate them. And for those without access to a proper clinic with trained professionals, the risk goes up exponentially.

If anti-abortion crusaders truly cared about reducing rates of unwanted pregnancies and abortions, they’d do what works – which is to fund medical services that provide women with the contraceptives they need to control those pregnancies. But their actions and voting records make very clear just where their priorities lie, and it isn’t in the well-being of women and teenagers.

(via Friendly Atheist)