I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Publicly funded family planning services save $4 for every dollar spent, says a report released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute.
Public funds also prevent nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and they prevent more than 800,000 abortions every year.Federal funding for family planning money has been in the news lately because an expansion of the program was included in an early version of the federal stimulus bill. After House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner made a fuss over the issue, President Barack Obama pressured House Democrats to drop the provision.
But the Guttmacher study reinforces Democrats’ claims that increasing public funding for family planning would be a cost-cutting measure. Because most women who receive publicly funded family-planning services would also be eligible to have Medicaid pay for their births, preventing unintended births saves taxpayers a significant amount of money.
About half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended but 40 percent of poor women can’t afford birth control.
As FOX News acknowledged recently:
A 2007 study by the Congressional Budget Office found sizable federal savings if states were free to give contraceptives to poor women. The report found that post-pregnancy family planning did nothing to reduce the cost of Medicaid-funded births. But preventing pregnancies by providing contraceptives, the study found, would save the federal government an estimated $200 million over five years.
