COLUMN: Family planning preserves values, government dollars

---

by Brandon Pike

---

How can far-right Republicans be at once anti-choice when it comes to reproductive rights and against funding and support for family planning projects? This lapse in logic is a product of the right-wing myth machine.

They want to demonize family planning as offensive to traditional family values by linking it to casual sex and the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, suggesting that family planning means abortion. It does not. Some family planning organizations do offer abortion counseling and referrals if a woman opts for the procedure, and all of them believe in reproductive rights, but their chief mission is to provide adequate, low-cost methods of contraception.

Statistics indicate that 3.1 million unintended pregnancies are prevented each year by the efforts of the National Family Planning Program. One million three hundred thousand of those pregnancies would have resulted in unwanted births, 40,000 miscarriages and 1.4 million abortions. Anti-choicers shouldn't be picketing Planned Parenthood; they should be thanking them.

Ralph Reed claims that the Christian Coalition seeks to affect "family-friendly public policy." But try getting anti-choice Republicans like Steve Stockman or Phil Gramm to vote to fund government-supported family planning programs. Good luck.

However, for every federal dollar spent on family planning, $4.40 is saved in future government medical and social services, totaling $1.8 billion dollars in savings annually. Furthermore, a study by J.D. Forest showed that without government funding, we would have to deal with an additional 1.2 million unintended pregnancies and 516,000 additional abortions. The impact on future government expenditures for social and health services should be obvious.

Yet saving federal dollars by implementing a proactive family planning agenda will never pass muster with the Christian Coalition's congressional lackeys.

In fact, Christian Righters in the 104th Congress battled earlier this year to eliminate funding for family planning services provided in the Title X family planning program of the Public Health Service Act, which, I should note, was signed into law by President Nixon in 1970. (And before I get flamed by an army of conservatives, I should also mention that no funds dispersed under Title X subsidize abortion.)

Republican extremists launched a crusade to dilute or fully eradicate programs which provide access to low-cost contraception for low-income women.

These women are precisely the ones that Republicans are constantly blaming for the burgeoning welfare system -- accusing them of having baby after baby in order to draw bigger welfare checks.

How can conservatives both issue scathing philippics against immoral, impoverished and irresponsible single mothers, and refuse to provide them with accessible and affordable preventive measures? If we increase expenditures on contraceptive services directed to low-income women and make sure that these women know how and where to obtain birth-control, the birth rate in that community will shrink. Success by the extremist wing of the Republican Party in dismantling family planning provisions would only exacerbate the current crisis.

If we truly want to reduce the alarming number of teenage pregnancies, decrease the number of abortions and reduce the amount of tax dollars spent on medical and social services to unwed mothers and their unwanted children, we must advance the cause and increase the scope of family planning efforts by funding government programs such as Title X and by supporting the National Family Planning Program and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Family planning, contrary to the espousals of the Christian Right myth-makers, does nothing to erode family values in America. Fewer women would need to exercise their right to choose if contraception and family planning services were affordable, accessible and acceptable in the United States.

It makes perfect sense.

Brandon Pike is a member of Rice Young Democrats and a Wiess College senior.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the October 4, 1996 issue.

Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights Reserved.
This document may be distributed electronically, provided that it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted without the express written permission of:
The Rice Thresher, Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA.