A new study conducted by the Brookings Institution essentially says the government pays too much money on children born from unintended pregnancies who may otherwise have become victims of abortion.
The non-profit organization says unintended pregnancies, that could be prevented with abortion or efforts promoting contraception or birth control, cost the federal and state governments more than $11 billion a year.
Adam Thomas, research director at the institution’s Center on Children and Families and co-author of the paper, told the Dow Jones News service: “You’re not going to balance the budget by implementing pregnancy-prevention policies–it’s a small slice of the pie,” but he said governments could reduce the cost of the pregnancies by doing more to promote such programs.
Thomas and co-author Emily Monea estimate governments spent between $9.6 billion and $12.6 billion on more than 1.2 million unintended pregnancies in 2001 and that the money covered 168, 000 abortions, 782,000 births and medical care for infants five or younger because women who unintentionally get pregnancy are of lower income and would qualify for the medical care and abortion costs in states that pay for abortions with taxpayer funds.
“I don’t think the main reason for implementing these programs should be saving government dollars, but it’s certainly a great benefit,” Monea told Dow Jones.
Planned Parenthood, which benefits from more than $350 million in government funding of its birth control and family planning efforts, naturally applauded the results of the survey.
“If anyone doubted that affordable birth control is good for families and good for taxpayers, these new findings should set the record straight,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.
But Wendy Wright, the president of Concerned Women for America, told LifeNews.com in response that they survey makes it appear it is finally better to devalue human life by funding the Planned Parenthood abortion business or promoting abortions on children conceived in unplanned pregnancies.
“The researchers have a bizarre way of looking at children, and clearly do not understand women,” she said. “While a pregnancy may be ‘unintended’ it does not mean the child is unwanted by the mother or others, nor of any less value as a person than the researchers who mislabel them.”
“Government funding of Planned Parenthood-type pregnancy-prevention programs has not decreased the number of pregnancies that they call ‘unintended’. In fact, the more government funding that Planned Parenthood receives, the more abortions it commits,” she said.
Wright also says the fact that Planned Parenthood receives so much money and the study finds unplanned pregnancies happening anyway is a clear indication that its programs haven’t worked and the money is better spent elsewhere.
She told LifeNews, “For years, abortion advocates have claimed there are 1.2 million so-called ‘unintended’ pregnancies each year. This is the basis of their demand for increased spending on their pregnancy-prevention programs, for easy access to the morning-after pill, and for opposing regulations on abortion. Yet none of their ‘solutions’ have reduced ‘unintended’ pregnancies or abortions. At what point will politicians see through their greed?”
“One obvious reason why Planned Parenthood’s programs do not work is that they encourage irresponsible sex. Clearly, Planned Parenthood and their allies have no incentive for reducing so-called ‘unintended’ pregnancies or abortions because then they would be out of business,” she concluded.
