Take Action - Talking Points
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NARAL P.O. Box 279 |
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Talking Points:
Please use these talking points to send a message to Montanans and those in the legislature that family planning services are vital for women and families. Access to family planning improves women’s health and the health of their children, reduces unintended pregnancy and abortion, and is highly cost-effective.
Nine in ten Americans support subsidized family planning. Despite widespread public support and the importance of these services to American women and the nation as a whole, anti-choice lawmakers have consistently attacked these programs. As a result, decreased funding of family planning services has left low-income women without reproductive health care. All of Montana’s women deserve access to reproductive healthcare.
Publicly funded family planning prevents 1.3 million unintended pregnancies and 632,300 abortions annually, leading to better quality of life for women and their families, including lower risks of inadequate prenatal care, fetal exposure to tobacco and alcohol, physical abuse of the mother, and economic hardship.
Publicly funded contraceptive services have a particularly profound impact on adolescents. Without such publicly funded services, 385,800 additional teens would become pregnant annually.
Receipt of publicly funded family planning services increases the likelihood that a woman will receive adequate prenatal care if she does become pregnant.
Women of color are disproportionately poor and less likely than white women to have health insurance. As a result, women of color are less likely than white women to receive adequate reproductive health care, resulting in negative health outcomes.
Increased funding for family planning is crucial to eliminating racial disparities in healthcare and ensuring that all women receive adequate health care and have real choices over their reproductive lives.
Every government dollar spent on contraceptive services saves the public approximately $3.00 in funds that otherwise would have been spent through Medicaid.
Without publicly funded services, approximately 338,000 additional women would experience unintended pregnancies and carry them to term, making them eligible for pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage. As a result, the nation would spend an additional $1.2 billion for Medicaid each year on costs associated with unplanned births and abortion.
Funding for Title X—the only federal program exclusively dedicated to family planning and reproductive health services—has decreased by more than 50 percent in constant dollars over the past two decades.
While funding for Title X has decreased, the cost of providing some of the services has risen.
If every Montanan, regardless of economic status, has access to contraception the number of abortions will decrease. Of the unplanned pregnancies that occur each year, 47 percent occur among the 7 percent of women at risk of unintended pregnancy who do not practice contraception.
A 2002 study using the most recent data showed that 11 percent of women having abortions have never used a method of birth control.
Access to family planning services improves the health of Montana’s women and children; therefore, investing in family planning programs is an investment in the future of Montana.
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