The latest effort in the GOP saga to undermine American health care comes with an unsurprising ploy to restrict access to Planned Parenthood, which offers family planning and preventative care.
With each step in the Republicans’ fight to replace the Affordable Care Act, pro-lifers find new ways of politicizing women’s bodies.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when a GOP health care bill comes along, it includes another attempt to defund our country’s most prominent women’s health organization.
Unsurprisingly, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Better Care Reconciliation Act, the latest Senate Republican health care bill, would lead to thousands of unplanned pregnancies as a result of cuts to Planned Parenthood.
According to Vox, the bill prohibits people from receiving family planning services, reproductive health care and abortion services under several health care plans. Planned Parenthood offers this complete trifecta of services.
If the bill passes, low-income American women on Medicaid would be barred from receiving care from the facility best equipped to provide these services to them.
Meanwhile, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood directly contradict statistical evidence that access to contraceptives and legal abortion reduces the rate of unplanned pregnancies and abortion, in turn.
The Guttmacher Institute, the country’s leading think tank on reproductive health, reported that our abortion rate is at a historic low since the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion access across the country.
Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards said via Twitter that the data “shows that we’re finally doing a better job of helping women get access to birth control that’s affordable and that’s high-quality.”
Preventative health care services like Planned Parenthood have been empirically correlated with fewer unplanned pregnancies and fewer abortions. Comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access permit more women, couples and families to gain the knowledge necessary to properly plan their future.
It’s frustrating to see pro-life politicians and their constituents more interested in keeping women in the dark than helping provide them with the preventative care that lowers abortion rates in the first place.
Sadly, efforts to restrict reproductive health care on all levels—from access to birth control to abortion—are nothing new.
Earlier this year, Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life told Joy Reid on MSNBC that in her ideal world, birth control methods like the pill and IUD would be made illegal because they “kill children,” just as abortions do.
Days ago, the Missouri State Senate considered legislation that would allow employers and landlords to punish women for their reproductive health choices, such as using birth control or having previously had an abortion, according to Newsweek.
It’s clear that the pro-life ideology is about bodily control and forced birth. If their movement was truly about protecting life, pro-life politicians and advocates would focus their efforts on providing the preventative care that reduces abortion rates in the first place.
Instead, their efforts are focused on taking sexual health and reproductive resources away from the American public, putting women, couples and families in danger.
Let women be in control of their own bodies so they can make the best decisions for themselves and their futures.
