Even as a national debate rages over contraception insurance, tens of thousands of low-income women and teenagers across the United States have lost access to subsidized birth control as states slash and restructure family-planning funds. This is the opening paragraph written by Stephanie Simon published at IBtimes.com published Saturday, March 3, 2012 about the government stepping in and cutting the funding that goes to facilities that support pre family planning. Most women that use these types of facilities are women in lower income bracket or in the poverty level who can’t afford to go to regular doctor office and pay the high price of office visits or doctor prescribed birth control. “Montana and New Jersey have eliminated their state family-planning programs; New Hampshire cut its funding by 57 percent; and five other states made more modest program trims. But the biggest impact, by far, has been in Texas. Within months, one half of the state supported family planning clinics in Texas had closed. The state network—which once provided 220,000 women a year with free and low-cost birth control, cervical cancer tests and diabetes screenings—will now serve just 40,000 to 60,000, officials said” (Simon). These facts are a very harsh and very sad reality for many who cannot afford the proper health care and it is scary to think that our government can control who can get contraceptives.
This article reminded me of the reading From Norplant to the Contraceptive Vaccine: The New Frontier of Population Control by Dorothy Roberts. Roberts states that poor black woman were targeted and pressured to a controversial birth control in the hopes of decreasing the birthrate and how in the 1990’s, legislators and policymakers in the United States seized up Norplant as a means of domestic population control (Roberts, pg. 200). Even though this is about the government trying to control the population and how many babies coming into this world the idea is still the same. The government thinks it can step in whenever it is convenient and decide who and how people should live and breed in their free American lives. And while in the 1990’s the government was trying to control how many low income woman had babies, now they are taking away the very thing that would make that possible. In the article Simon writes that in Texas a budget board did an analysis and concluded that the cut in family planning budget would actually cost Texas taxpayers more money than it would be saving. Doesn’t make much sense to cut it when it is only going to hurt the taxpayers and to make matters worse the political world is now turning the birth control access into an abortion debate. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but they also run a network of urban and suburban clinics offering birth control, gynecological exams, and care for sexually transmitted diseases, so because it gets one-third of its revenue from government grants to provide those services to poor woman, the government and political supporters think that it should be shut down (Simon, ibtimes.com). I feel like the woman in the story My Fight for Birth Control, Margret Sanger, where she feels so hopeless because she should have helped that poverty stricken mother, who didn’t want to bring another child into the despair of poverty, but she couldn’t because it was unheard of to use birth control and this woman lost her life in an attempt to stop a pregnancy and it wouldn’t and didn’t have to happen if only someone had stood up sooner and said this what you need, this is the birth control you should use.
It is funny to me as a woman who has used birth control for a long time and had the privilege to get whenever I needed it as why this issue about birth control is just focused on the woman? Why is it never about the men and their need for birth control, why are we the ones that have take on the responsibility to say I am not ready right now to have a baby. Why is that burden not ever put upon the man?
References
Sanger, Margret. (1931) My Fight for Birth Control.
Roberts, Dorothy. (1997) From Norplant to the Contraceptive Vaccine: The New Frontier of Population Control.
Simon, Stephanie. (2012, March 3), http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/308570/20120303/birth-control-subsidies-state-national-debate.htm
Angie, I really enjoyed reading your article summary. It reminded me a lot of the article I read and wrote about. I am too, amazed how much the government still has control over our reproductive health. I still believe a lot of it is tied to religion as it is for the Phillepeno's that I wrote about. I do not think it is just coincidence that the largest impact was felt in Texas first. A 2008 study shows that over 27 percent of Texas' population is Catholic. Considering Texas' population is one of the largest in the US, I think it speaks volumes (http://old.usccb.org/comm/archives/2008/08-160.shtml).
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