The Political Attack on Working Women and Families

Budget cutting is serious business, and it is part of a wholesale partisan attack on the lives of those who do not vote Republican. The House has voted to cut Title X, the program that provides low-income women with family planning; $75 million of the $317 million eliminated goes to Planned Parenthood. And legislation was successfully proposed by Indiana Republican Mike Pence that would deny all federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Taken together, Planned Parenthood would lose 40% of its funding.

Defunding Planned Parenthood is part of an ideological war on the government programs that make it possible for politically invisible women to control their lives. For many women who lack access to basic health care, Planned Parenthood is their only source of access to contraception, cancer screening, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, adoption counseling -- and yes, as the conservatives claim, for abortion, though abortion is only 3% of its services. Cutting these programs energizes the right, but it ultimately increases both the number of abortions and the costs to the public from more unintended births. Without services from Title X-supported family planning centers, unintended pregnancy and abortion in the United States would be one-third higher, and they saved taxpayers $3.4 billion in 2008, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Like the attacks on collective bargaining in Wisconsin, they are more about ideological purity and electoral politics than about fiscal restraint.

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