The cutbacks in welfare mean that many poor, unemployed, and underemployed women will be unable to bear the cost of giving birth to a child and unable to provide for the child once born. The proposed family cap and teen mother exclusion would cut these women off from any means of support for their child. It is unfair to force a woman to give birth while cutting her and her baby off from any means to support them.
Cutting Medicaid funding for all eligible women will cost more money than it saves. For every $1.00 invested in providing abortion services, $4.00 in delivery costs are saved. Additional costs include health, welfare, and social service expenses for the child until age eighteen. Cutting funding will lead to an increase in second trimester abortions. It is reported that 22% of poor women delayed abortion from first to second trimester because of lack of funding. Similarly, 2/3 of women who get abortions state that they cannot afford a baby at this time.
It is contrary to the policy of helping women out of poverty to force them to give birth to babies they cannot afford. Cutting funding is contrary to the policy of Medicaid to provide health care for women who cannot afford it. It is contrary to the policy of supporting children, because it forces the mother to take food, clothing, and other essentials away from her other children in order to pay for an abortion since a first trimester abortion costs more than half a monthly AFDC grant.
It is unfair that if you have the money, you have the right and access to abortion, but if you don't have the money, then you get only the health care that others decide you can get. This ends up forcing families to have more children than they can afford.
Washington State NOW supports funding family
planning and sex education to reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
But since half of pregnancies in the US are due to failure of contraception
or improper use, we still need to have safe, legal, and affordable access
to abortion services available for all women. Due to poor family planning
and sex education, the US abortion rate is 5 times that of the Netherlands
where sex education and family planning are a strong part of the school
curriculum. NOW supports increasing control over reproduction and reducing
the rate of unwanted pregnancies through funding better sex education and
contraceptive practices, while continuing to fund Medicaid abortions.
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