AUGUSTA – Let’s face it. We are all concerned about money: we worry about our investments, our children’s college education, credit card debt, taxes, health care costs, jobs — the list goes on and on. No one is immune to life’s economic realities.

Last fall, voters across the nation expressed their concern, fear, anger, impatience, or, in some cases, hatred, and cast their vote demanding a solution to our nation’s financial problems. Rarely did candidates speak of anything else.

Now, instead of solving the monumental financial problems that affect all of us as taxpayers and citizens, some of our elected officials in Maine and Washington, D.C., have decided that their priority is to impose their personal social agendas.

Many of us — and I am proud to count myself among them — invest our professional lives working toward the betterment of women: helping women achieve their goals and ensuring that every woman, without discrimination, has access to reproductive health care. And never in my 20 years in Maine have I witnessed an attack on women so insulting, condescending and relentless as I have in the past two months.

Case in point: family planning — a basic concept that enables women to make decisions about whether and when to have a child. It’s a simple idea, really, with widespread support.

Title X, the federal program dedicated to ensuring that every woman, despite her income, has access to family planning services (birth control) was enacted in 1970 by President Nixon.

Title X stands as one of the nation’s most successful economic opportunity programs, giving women the ability to advance their education, to participate in the work force, and to support their families.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to eliminate the federal Title X program.

At the same time, the state’s biennial budget proposes a $448,000 cut to family planning — roughly a third of the state funding currently allocated for low-income women and teenagers in need of reproductive health care.

The educational, professional, emotional, and economic value of family planning services for Maine women and teenagers is clear. But what does our investment in Maine Family Planning mean to taxpayers?

You decide:

• According to a study published this month by the Guttmacher Institute, publicly funded (aka taxpayer dollars) family planning services helped Maine women avoid 5,600 unintended pregnancies and the 2,500 births that would have followed, saving Maine $12,541,000 in public funds in 2008 alone.

• Maine Family Planning operates 45 health centers from Fort Kent to Sanford so that no Mainer is without access to reproductive health care. You will find public family planning dollars going to your local rural health center, community-based health center, school-based health center, or a federally-qualified health care center.

• Approximately 30,000 Mainers annually get health care at a family planning health center — for many, it is the only source of care they can afford all year.

• Maine has the seventh lowest teen birth rate in the nation. That’s good news, since Maine had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation 20 years ago. Moreover, Maine’s teen pregnancy rate decreased by 48 percent between 1988 and 2005 and by 27 percent between 1994 and 2004, one of the most dramatic improvements in the nation.

• Without publicly funded family planning services, Maine’s teen pregnancy rate would jump 103 percent and the abortion rate would increase by 86 percent. So let’s return to dollars and sense. We all want to contribute to Maine’s economic recovery, right?

Here is a program that is critical to young women in Maine who want to achieve their dreams and play their part in our economic recovery — a program that spends roughly $4 million and saves more than $12 million annually. We need to face reality — it’s our tax dollars — and it’s good sense.

– Special to the Press Herald

 

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