Healthy women, healthy economy

We all know that reproductive health care is a necessity for women to lead healthy lives.  But it’s also an economic issue on a par with equal pay, raising the minimum wage, and paid sick leave.  Simply put, being able to choose when and if to have a child is crucial for the economic success of women and their families.  And when women can control their health, taxpayers save money — a win-win situation for everyone.  As it turns out, making sure women can reach their full potential isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do.

President Obama recognizes this in his budget released this week — making fiscally responsible investments in women’s health programs.  It reflects a strong commitment to ensure our country continues to move forward, not backward, on women’s health.

{mosads}Without affordable and easily obtainable birth control, together with comprehensive sex education and safe and legal abortion, women cannot achieve economic stability for their families.  With that in mind, the president’s budget calls for an increase in funding for the Title X Family Planning Program, which helps provide millions of women across the country with access to basic reproductive health care like birth control.  The budget also demonstrates a continued commitment to funding evidence-based sexuality education programs.

Thanks to these programs, we have made tremendous progress in public health outcomes as a country.  We’ve achieved 40-year lows in teen pregnancy and abortion rates.  Family planning also prevents cervical cancer deaths — thanks to Pap test screenings — as well as breast cancer deaths.  And since women are the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of American households with children, what’s good for women is good for the next generation.  It’s no wonder that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named family planning, including access to birth control, one of the 10 great public health achievements of the twentieth century.

Family planning services are also good for our wallets.  A 2012 University of Michigan study found that fully one-third of the wage gains women have made since the 1960s are the result of access to oral contraceptives.  This study also found that the decrease in the gap among 25- to 49-year-olds between men’s and women’s annual incomes “would have been 10 percent smaller in the 1980s and 30 percent smaller in the 1990s” in the absence of widespread legal birth control access.  Highlighting the fact that birth control is a top economic driver for women, Bloomberg Businessweek recently listed contraception as one of the most transformational developments in the business sector in the last 85 years.

And it’s not only women and families who benefit.  These investments in women’s health services are a great deal for all taxpayers.  According to research released by the Guttmacher Institute, for every $1 we invest in publicly funded family planning services, we save $7 in the long run.

While we’ve made tremendous progress in women’s access to health care, we still have a long ways to go as a country to ensure that every woman, no matter where she lives or how much money she makes, can access the full range of reproductive health services.  That includes abortion. 

We applaud the president for excluding the DC abortion ban, a provision restricting the District of Columbia from deciding whether to use local revenue to help low-income women access safe abortion.  Unfortunately, the budget continues existing abortion restrictions, like the Hyde Amendment, which severely obstruct access to safe abortion for women who depend on the government for their health care.  As we have seen, low-income women and their families need access to safe, legal abortion to move forward and upward.  These women are unable to access abortion because politicians are interfering in their ability to make their own health care decisions.  Inequality — both in women’s health care and in their economic conditions — will continue until these harmful restrictions are removed. 

As the nation’s leading women’s health care provider and advocate, Planned Parenthood sees every day that the best way to prevent unintended pregnancies is to make sure that women have access to affordable, quality reproductive health care.  History shows us that access to reproductive health care has completely changed life for women in America and that women’s success is key to American progress.  President Obama’s budget for the coming year is on the right side of history and on the right side of the future.  We hope that Congress will join the administration’s commitment to moving forward on women’s health care.

Singiser is vice president for Public Policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.