Mostly that will mean that poor minority women will have more kids they cannot afford. Why would anyone want this? Abortion is a necessary evil.
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Cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood — a longstanding conservative goal that is included in the Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act — would sharply increase Medicaid births, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Because nearly half of all births nationwide are to Medicaid patients, and many of those babies are Medicaid patients themselves, the budget office estimated that defunding Planned Parenthood even for a year would increase Medicaid spending by $21 million in the first year, and $77 million by 2026.
The budget office numbers, released this week as part of an overall analysis of the Republican health bill, are based on economic modeling, but real-life experience in at least one state shows a similar result.
In Texas, where the state cut off money to Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, thousands of women stopped getting long-acting birth control in the first 18 months, and Medicaid pregnancies increased by 27 percent, according to a research paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine last year.
Planned Parenthood has long been a target of conservatives for being a leading provider of abortions in the United States, although abortions make up a small percentage of its services, which are more likely to include birth control and screening for sexually transmitted diseases. In fact, many of its clinics do not perform abortions; in Wisconsin, for example, only two of the organization’s 21 clinics do. Federal funding is never used to pay for them; since 1977, a law known as the Hyde Amendment has prohibited using federal money for abortions.