NYTimes | One
would imagine that congressional Republicans, almost all of whom are on
record as adamantly opposing abortion, would be eager to fund programs
that help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
That would be the common sense approach, anyway.
And
yet since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have been
trying to obliterate the highly effective federal family-planning
program known as Title X, which gives millions of lower-income and rural
women access to contraception, counseling, lifesaving cancer
screenings, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
They tried and failed in 2011, when the Senate was under Democratic control — although they still managed to extract
significant cuts from an already underfunded program. Now that
Republicans run the show, opponents of sensible and effective family
planning are back to kill it off for good. Last Tuesday, a House
subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services proposed to eliminate all Title X funding — about $300 million — from a 2016 spending bill.
The
bill would also slash funding by up to 90 percent for sex education,
specifically President Obama’s teen-pregnancy prevention initiative. The
only winner was abstinence-only education, whose funding the
subcommittee voted to double, despite the fact that it has basically no
effect on abstinence and has been associated with higher rates of teen pregnancy.
Meanwhile,
Title X, which was enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in
Congress in 1970, is caught up once again in the nation’s abortion wars —
even though like all federal programs, it is barred from providing any
funding for abortions.
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