Word on the street is that if Planned Parenthood stops killing babies, more babies will end up dead.
At least, that’s what liberal columnist Ana Marie Cox tried to argue on MSNBC’s Up with Steve Kornacki Saturday.
According to Ana Marie Cox at MSNBC, “if Planned Parenthood did not provide birth control, the abortion rate would be, some people say, 2/3 as high as it is today.”
Too bad that her argument has been debunked by the very group that she cites.
Surveying data from the 2006 fiscal year, the report says the national family planning program prevented 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies. Based on statistical analysis and projections, these pregnancies would have resulted in 860,000 unintended births, 810,000 abortions and 270,000 miscarriages, according to the report.
Without publicly funded family planning, it said, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher, and nearly twice as high among poor women.
Without publicly funded family planning, it said, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher, and nearly twice as high among poor women.
Another study by the same institute makes the opposite claim. You really can have it both ways.
Perhaps the most tragic result of the funding restrictions, however, is that a significant number of women who would have had an abortion had it been paid for by Medicaid instead end up continuing their pregnancy. A number of studies have examined how many women are forced to forgo their right to abortion and bear children they did not intend. Studies published over the course of two decades looking at a number of states concluded that 18–35% of women who would have had an abortion continued their pregnancies after Medicaid funding was cut off. According to Stanley Henshaw, a Guttmacher Institute senior fellow and one of the nation’s preeminent abortion researchers, the best such study, which was published in the Journal of Health Economics in 1999, examined abortion and birthrates in North Carolina, where the legislature created a special fund to pay for abortions for poor women. In several instances between 1978 and 1993, the fund was exhausted before the end of the fiscal year, so financial support was unavailable to women whose pregnancies occurred after that point. The researchers concluded that about one-third of women who would have had an abortion if support were available carried their pregnancies to term when the abortion fund was unavailable.
Watch clip below:
