CBO Claims GOP Health Bill Will Boost Unwanted Pregnancies
Pro-life advocates blast report suggesting Planned Parenthood cuts mean less access to birth control.
The forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office evidently believe that Planned Parenthood is the only way some women can get birth control.
The forecast on the House GOP health care reform bill that envisions a 10-year increase [1] of 24 million people without insurance also predicts several thousand more unplanned pregnancies as a result of a provision cutting off federal funding to the nation’s largest abortion provider. Planned Parenthood and its clinics would lose $178 million in fiscal year 2017 and $234 million through fiscal year 2026.
“Planned Parenthood certainly has put out a lot of misinformation about how important they are and how they can’t be replaced.”
“To the extent that there would be reductions in access to care under the legislation, they would affect services that help women avert pregnancies,” the CBO report released Monday states. “The people most likely to experience reduced access to care would probably reside in areas without other health care clinics or medical practitioners who serve low-income populations.”
The budget forecast projects those unplanned pregnancies would raise Medicaid spending by $21 million in 2017 and by $77 million through 2016, partially offsetting the savings achieved by the Planned Parenthood cuts.
Anti-abortion groups hotly disputed those findings Tuesday.
“Planned Parenthood certainly has put out a lot of misinformation about how important they are and how they can’t be replaced,” said Jim Sedlack, executive director of the American Life League. “And the Congressional Budget Office, unfortunately, appears to have bought that.”
Sedlack said Planned Parenthood has closed 300 health clinics since 1998, including many in rural areas. He said it largely has vacated west Texas and the Texas panhandle. He said Amarillo does not have a Planned Parenthood clinic within 250 miles.
Yet the teen pregnancy rate has declined, Sedlack said.
“It obviously showed that Planned Parenthood was not needed for those services,” he said.
By law, federal funds cannot directly subsidize abortions. But conservatives long have sought to cut off Planned Parenthood because the funding allows the organization to use money from other sources to pay for terminated pregnancies.
Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood argued that the CBO bolsters its claim that the American Health Care Act would hurt women. Dana Singiser, vice president for public policy and government relations at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement that freezing out her organization would risk reversing a trend that has resulted in a 30-year low in unplanned pregnancies.
“The CBO score of the ACA repeal bill reaffirms what we already know: the provision to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood would have disastrous consequences and result in women losing access to care, especially services that help women prevent unintended pregnancies,” she stated.
Chuck Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said in a statement that the CBO projection appears to rely on a 2015 estimate by the office that used a figure for reversible contraceptive clients at Planned Parenthood that was higher than reality.
He argued that Planned Parenthood’s client base has declined by 14 percent over the past five years, in part because of increased funding of community health centers. He noted that the bill would add another $422 million in new spending on those clinics.
“Women affected by the bill are those who currently have Medicaid coverage, which can be used at a variety of clinics that outnumber Planned Parenthood centers by at least 20 to 1, a ratio that does not count still more options like doctor’s offices, walk-in clinics, and chain-store clinics that offer many forms of contraception and frequently accept Medicaid,” Donovan said in the statement.
Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told LifeZette that she knows of nowhere in America where alternatives to Planned Parenthood do not exist.
“Planned Parenthood would like everyone to think that if they’re not funded, there will be no other way to get birth control,” she said. “Thats obviously not the case.”
