approved oral contraceptives, which changed the lives of generations of
women, giving them the choice of when and how to have children.
Five decades later, however, millions of the country’s poorest women aren’t sharing in the empowerment.
Nearly 59 percent of women who are in need of
subsidized family planning nationwide aren’t receiving care, according
to data from the
“People think you can just go to the corner drugstore and have your needs taken care of,” Guttmacher public policy associate
Guttmacher’s most recent study was released in 2006,
before unemployment skyrocketed and the country sank into a recession.
At the time, the national unemployment rate was 4.7 percent, 5
percentage points lower than it is today. Even then, however, 17.5
million women of reproductive age needed assistance paying for
contraception, according to Guttmacher.
“We can only predict that new data is going to be worse,” said
As people across the country are losing jobs — and their health insurance — many more women are either turning to
“Skipping pills is a big phenomenon,” Coleman said.
“As the recession gets bigger, more people are falling into low income
and staying there longer. They may have thought, ‘I will be OK because
I have six months of pills.’ Then they get to the end and don’t have a
job. They can’t afford to get the checkup. Then they start going to
less effective methods.”
Individual women aren’t the only ones who are struggling to find room in their budgets for birth control. States are, too.
Family-planning funding across the country comprises
a patchwork of different funding types that can be complicated,
confusing and different from state to state. The state-based options
range from private-public partnerships, with providers such as Planned
Parenthood, to community health centers and private physicians.
However, the most common source of funding for subsidized and no-cost
birth control was
One of the most successful family-planning programs
in the country is in one of the most financially unstable states. For
the past 11 years,
Family PACT plan has been providing free family-planning services to
women who earn less than 200 percent of the national poverty level,
which is about
“We’re serving about 1.8 million Californians today,” said
per year per client, but when we did our last survey in 2002, we were
saving the state and federal government nearly a billion dollars every
two years.”
The savings are realized by preventing pregnancies
in women who would need financial assistance with prenatal, birthing
and postnatal care and, in some instances, treatment for pregnancy
complications, Weaver said.
system is intended to reduce or eliminate as many barriers to accessing
assistance as possible. Not only is its income threshold one of the
highest in the country, women also are enrolled and eligible for
services on the same day. They can go to walk-in clinics and walk out
with their contraceptives.
Still, Guttmacher estimates that only 55 percent of the women who need services in
That number is good compared with some states, however. In
“The challenge around rural areas is funding and confidentiality,” said
“You’re likely to know someone who is working in your health
department. For many people, the fear of being seen or known will
prevent them from going to get services.”
funds to offset the cost of family planning. However, for the past 15
years the state has had an abstinence-only sex-education system.
According to Johnson, the abstinence-only plan
wasn’t working. Johnson and a bipartisan group of legislators and
advocates recently helped pass a comprehensive sex-education plan that
will go into effect this fall.
“It took us two years to really help legislators
understand that you start with abstinence and you continue with
providing medically accurate information,” she said.
Untangling family-planning preventive measures from
discussions of abortion was a key step, Johnson said. If the two issues
become linked and abortion fights grab headlines, family planning gets
lost in the outcry.
In the final health care bill that
expansion included in the law will do away with the need for state
waivers and patchwork funding systems. Low-income families will have
access to the same family-planning options across the country.
While the health care measure may not have had bipartisan support, federally funded family planning does.
“I think more and more Republicans are certainly
coming around to saying that we can separate prevention and planning
from abortion,” said
director of the Republican Majority for Choice, an organization that
supports reproductive rights. “Whether you’re pro- or anti-choice, we
all want to see the rate and need for abortion to go down.”
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(c) 2010, Medill News Service
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
