In the recent months, Planned Parenthood has come under fire from the government. First, from a video of Planned Parenthood workers discussing selling body parts of dead aborted fetuses (which was proven to be an altered video) to losing funding from the federal government. Republican lawmakers in the House recently passed a large bill, which included that the federal government would pull roughly $300 million dollars from the non-profit organization for one year.
If this goes through, it is projected that defunding Planned Parenthood would actually increase government spending. According to Vox.com, 630,000 Planned Parenthood patients could lose access to medical care. There would be more unplanned births as women lost access to services such as contraception, as well as a possible increase in STDs being spread. Medicaid would have to pay for some of those unplanned births, and some of the children themselves would then end up qualifying for Medicaid and other government programs. Altogether, taxpayers would wind up paying about $130 million dollars for roughly ten years.
“This legislation threatens millions of people’s access to preventive health care,” Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said Thursday in a statement. “In their obsession with attacking women’s access to health care, extreme members of Congress would take basic health care away from people who need it most — those who are struggling to get by, who rely on Medicaid or have no health insurance, and those who live in areas with few medical options.”