Eight Billion or Bust

Last week it was estimated that the world population hit seven billion. As the world population expands at a rate unprecedented in human history, this gives us a moment to consider population growth and control within the United States.

One important element of President Obama’s healthcare plan is a mandate providing for contraception at no deductible and no co-pay. Like so many other provisions of Obamacare, the contraception provision is being attacked from a number of interested groups. Catholic hospitals are challenging the mandate as applied to their employees because the Vatican remains largely anti-birth control. Other conservative groups are simply claiming that it is outside the government’s role to pay for birth control. Such considerations aside, most of these groups fail to understand the economic ramifications of failing to promote preventative birth control.

Interest groups may think its inappropriate to pay for a birth control prescription while conveniently forgetting that in the absence of birth control, women in lower socio-economic classes become more likely to become pregnant resulting in more abortions or more state aid to such families. In the end we all pay for contraception, reproductive health, and children, thus smarter policy would be to support birth control at all socio-economic levels in the hopes that prevention wins the day.

With the current budget crisis and looming across-the-board cuts, federal family planning programs are likely to see their budgets slashed. This is in addition to challenges to the contraception mandate provided for in Obamacare. The problem, of course, with such cuts is that without these measures, the number of unplanned pregnancies won’t suddenly decrease; instead these cuts are likely to lead to increased unwanted pregnancies and subsequent abortions. While the abortions and their attendant availability or expense are another issue, the pregnancies carried to term will likely increase demand for state assistance programs. The Guttmacher Institute found that women who incorrectly use birth control or do not have access to birth control represent a staggering 95% of the three million unwanted pregnancies each year in the US. The Institute also estimates that federally funded programs prevent 406,000 abortions each year while saving $3.4 billion in various safety net programs. Thus, $1 spent on birth control saves $3.74 down the road.

There are legitimate social and moral reasons to oppose abortion and there are also fair reasons to personally choose against various birth control methods. There is, however, little reason to doubt the good financial sense of federally funded birth control. Providing basic contraception is not synonymous with supporting abortions; contraception has a productive place in our society and we need to quickly embrace responsible and preventative birth control. Birth control has the ability to reduce abortions, decrease income inequality between men and women, and encourage further educational gains for girls in addition to the potential of saving the federal government billions of dollars each year.