The Impact of Publicly Funded Family Planning. (Issues in Brief).

Almost one in four of the 21 million women in the United States using some form of reversible contraception rely on public funds for their contraceptive care. Each year, publicly funded family planning helps 1.3 million women avoid an unintended pregnancy. If not prevented, 632,000 of these pregnancies would be terminated by abortion, 534,000 would result in unintended births and 165,000 would end in miscarriage.

According to a new analysis by The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI),* because a large percentage of the women obtaining publicly funded family planning services are Medicaid recipients or would become eligible if they became pregnant, every public dollar spent on contraception saves $3.00 that would otherwise have to be spent for pregnancy-related and newborn medical care alone. Anticipating the transfer of the federal welfare program to the states, this analysis is limited to savings in Medicaid; it greatly understates the total public costs that would be incurred in the absence of publicly funded family planning.

For a quarter century, the federal and state governments have subsidized family planning services for women who might otherwise not be able to obtain them. While there are many ways to assess the value of publicly funded family planning, the new AGI calculations are the latest in a line of examinations of one aspect of this question: What, if any, savings eventually accrue back to the taxpayer from expenditures for contraceptive services that help women avoid unintended pregnancies?

The methodology of this new study closely follows those of previous efforts. However, with the shape and scope of the nation's public assistance programs in flux, the current effort calculates only the public sector costs of the medical care that would be necessitated in the absence of publicly funded family planning. Unlike past examinations, it does not include any associated welfare expenses that would be incurred.

Methodology

Estimating the impact of publicly funded family planning involved four key steps:

* Data from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth were used to determine the number and characteristics of women who obtain contraceptives from publicly supported programs: these are the most recent characteristics data available.