How Not to Reduce Abortions

Details: 10 February 2012

The Nebraska Legislature is debating a bill (LB 540) that would require the state of Nebraska to expand taxpayer funding for birth control and other "family planning services." The bill was introduced by the Health and Human Services Committee which is chaired by Sen. Kathy Campbell.

The federal Medicaid program already covers such services for women who are at or below the federal poverty income level. However, Medicaid allows states to apply for a waiver in order to provide free (or discounted) birth control to women, men and adolescents, who have incomes above federal poverty guidelines.

LB 540 would expand income eligibility to 185 percent of the poverty guidelines. This would expand Medicaid payments for contraceptive family planning services so that approximately 26,000 more women would become eligible for these taxpayer-funded services. And Planned Parenthood, which operates the nation’s largest abortion chain, would be a major beneficiary of these guaranteed taxpayer-funded payments.

I testified, on behalf of the Nebraska Catholic Conference, in opposition to this bill when it received a public hearing last year. Unfortunately, the bill was voted out of committee a few weeks ago and was debated earlier this week on the floor of the Legislature. At the time of this writing its outcome was not certain.

One of the prime arguments used to promote the expansion of taxpayer funding for birth control is that it will reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions. I understand the intuitive appeal of this argument. However, there is little, if any, hard evidence to back it up. And the evidence that is provided is embarrassing in its reliance on estimates and assumptions, not on empirical data.

In contrast, there are dozens of published studies (i.e. "hard" data), conducted by birth control apologists, concluding that increased access to contraception does not reduce unintended pregnancies or abortions. Here are a few examples:

The January 2011 isssue of the journal Contraception (Volume 83, Issue 1, pages 82-87) featured a 10-year (1997 to 2007) study that examined the use of contraceptive methods in order to reduce the number of elective abortions. During the study period the overall use of contraceptive methods increased (from 49.1% to 79.9%) but the elective abortion rate doubled (from 5.52 to 11.49 per 1,000 women).

In a September 2006 editorial in the British Medical Journal Anna Glasier, a leading contraception researcher said: "Ten studies in different countries have shown that giving women a supply of emergency contraception to keep at home ... increases use by twofold to threefold ... but [has] had no measurable effect on rates of pregnancy or abortion."

In a May 2004 article in the publication Contraception Anna Glasier said about emergency contraception that "[e]stimates of efficacy are unsubstantiated by randomized trials. Efficacy is based on rather unreliable data and a great many assumptions and have been questioned both in the past and more recently. ... While advanced provision of EC probably prevents some pregnancies for some women some of the time, the strategy did not produce the public health breakthrough hoped for."

James Trussell who originated the claim that easier access to emergency contraception could "result in a greater than 50% reduction in abortion rates" has conceded that 23 published studies from 10 countries disprove his claim. According to every one of the 23 studies, published between 1998 and 2006, easier access to EC fails to achieve any statistically significant reduction in rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.

And then there is this inconvenient statistic: a majority of women having abortions were using contraception in the month they got pregnant. Here’s how the Alan Guttmacher Institute (i.e. Planned Parenthood) explained this phenomenon: "because women who are using contraceptives are motivated to prevent an unplanned birth, they are more likely than women who were not using contraception to seek an abortion should they accidentally become pregnant."

LB 540 may have enough support to be enacted. And senators may provide a variety of reasons for supporting the bill. But an interest in reducing abortions shouldn’t be one of them.

You can contact Greg at The Nebraska Catholic Conference, 215 Centennial Mall South Suite 310, Lincoln, NE 68508; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.