...According to this lastest report Washington State taxpayers pay $8.5 million for abortions. Washington State has the 3rd highest number (15,510) and price tag paid with public dollars ($8,528,000) for abortion. Only CA and NY use more state funds that Washington .
If I had a nickle for every person who said "keep the government out of abortion" but turned a blind eye to all the government involvement in abortion...
This report also comes on the heels of this week's lobbying efforts by Planned Parenthood of Western Washington to try and increase funding for their abortion generating Take Charge Program, which Jonathan has covered in detail here, here and here.
Planned Parenthood asks their supporters in an email dated 1/31/08 to contact the legislature and ask them to approve -
An emergency allocation of $8 million for family planning services across the state. (Maintain the $5 million for family planning in the Governor's budget and include an additional $3 million in the final budget.) This will provide family planning services for the nearly 33,000 low-income Washingtonians who are no longer able to participate in the federally funded Take Charge program, and will likely save nearly $126 million in pregnancy care costs.Well, yes I suppose abortion is cheaper than pre-natal care.
Here's the rest of the report I recieved from LeAnna:
The Guttmacher Institute (under a grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services) has just released a report that is a gold mine of information for the pro-life and abstinence movements.
The report, “Public funding for family planning, sterilization and abortion services, FY 1980–2006,” by Sonfield A, Alrich C and Gold RB, Occasional Report, New York: Guttmacher Institute, 2008, No. 38., which can be found here has a lot of information (some of it unpublished) directly from the federal government.
The authors, of course, try to argue that over $1.6 billion a year (!!) in federally funded contraception isn’t enough. They use some interesting math to show that even though the family planning funding has grown astronomically, it still isn’t keeping up with inflation (I didn’t realize that the price of condoms, etc. was keeping pace with the inflation index, would like to see some proof of that). This is the old appropriations trick where interest groups try to downplay their enormous increases by saying it doesn’t keep up with inflation. The reality is it has gone up, a ton! The authors also argue that this enormous federal spending effort, of course, prevents tons of unintended pregnancies and abortions (not substantiated in this paper, either).
Some information that the new paper includes:
- The numbers and state breakdown of 191 federally funded abortions in Fiscal Year 2009(under the Hyde amendment rape, incest and life of the mother abortions are paid for under Medicaid),
- The federal gov’t paid for the most abortions in Illinois (89), Virginia (27), Ohio (20), Minnesota (16), and South Carolina (12). See table 3.9 on page 27
- New updated info on how much in public funds goes to family planning ($1.85 billion in FY06--$1.6 billion of which is federal and $1.3 billion (or 71%) of which is from federal Medicaid funds.
The state and federal governments spent $89 million to fund 177,000 abortion procedures for low-income women in FY 2006. The federal government contributed
to the cost of only 191 procedures. Virtually all publicly funded abortion procedures occurred in the 17 states that have nonrestrictive abortion
policies.
Public expenditures for family planning client services totaled $1.85 billion in FY 2006. Medicaid accounted for 71% of the total, whereas state appropriations accounted for 13% and Title X accounted for 12% (Figure A). Together, other funding sources such as the MCH block grant, the SSBG and TANF, account for 5% of total funding. Although Medicaid was the dominant source of funding in most states, the other funding sources were vital in many specific states.
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