Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Opposing Abortion by Causing More of Them?

The extreme right wing consistently has the same knee jerk reaction anytime the issue of publicly funded family planning services is broached. They howled so much over the funds designated for family planning services in the stimulus package that it was eventually taken out. When President Obama issued an executive order expanding family planning, it whipped the most extreme into an irrational frenzy. Quite simply, if they really cared about lowering the numbers of abortions, they would actually support expanded public funding of family planning services.

A new study released today by the Guttmacher Institute confirms what people in the “reality-based” community have been saying all along. Publicly funded family planning services actually reduces the number of abortions each year. Specifically, the study found that 810,000 abortions were prevented each year because of complete family planning services. If the right wing’s goal is really less abortion, then why would they constantly fight the efforts that have proven to greatly reduce them?

For the penny-pinching conservative that only cares about government spending, the study shows that $4 are saved for every one dollar invested in family planning services. The lead author of the study couldn’t be any more accurate in saying that, “the national family planning program is smart government at its best.”

If these publicly financed family planning programs accomplish these things, then why does the right wing fight such efforts at every single turn? Whether it is just an irrational knee jerk or blind ideology, they should be exposed for fighting the very things that they claim to care about most.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The thing which makes the anti-abortion crowd understandable is knowing what they're true, unstated aim is: to push their own sexual mores onto others by keeping non-procreative and unmarried sex as risky as possible.