In her hysterical Letter to the Editor [1/9/09] attacking family planning and the funding of Title X health clinics, Jaime Marie Pinckard states, "When times are tough, you tighten the belt, not offer to pay for highly controversial ‘medical’ treatments."

She does not realize that family planning saves money by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and, consequently, abortions.

As the Guttmacher Institute recently reported:

"Publicly funded family planning clinics provide contraceptive services to about seven million women each year.

"Without these services, unintended pregnancy rates would be nearly 50 percent higher for all women and about two-thirds higher among low-income women."

According to recent Guttmacher research, 1.4 million unintended pregnancies, which would likely result in about 640,000 unintended births and 600,000 abortions, are averted each year because of these services.

Research shows that these services save Advertisement

[ Chatton and Associates ] $4.3 billion in public funds.

Nationally, every $1 invested in helping women avoid pregnancies they do not want saves $4.02 in Medicaid expenditures that otherwise would be needed, in addition to providing clear benefits to individual women and their families by helping them avoid unintended pregnancies and plan the pregnancies they do want.

Guttmacher research has also found that each $20 million increment in new funding under the Title X family planning services program alone would help women avoid another 17,200 unintended pregnancies, including 7,000 that would end in abortion.

Expanding eligibility for Medicaid-covered family planning services nationwide to the same income eligibility levels used for pregnant women would yield even greater results, further reducing unintended pregnancy and abortion by 15 percent while achieving an additional $1.5 billion in net savings annually.

John Stickler