Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures have been pushing to defund Planned Parenthood for years, despite the organization being far more popular with voters than Congress. They claim it’s about abortion, but abortion is a tiny fraction of the services Planned Parenthood offers, and Republicans aren’t such big fans of many of those other services, like birth control and, well, health care for low-income women—so take your pick. What happens if you take away birth control and health care for low-income women, though?
Defunding Planned Parenthood could have major public health effects. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would lead to thousands of additional births. Now, Yale political scientist Miranda Yaver has taken a look at some of the other effects Planned Parenthood may have on public health:
Reduced clinic access is associated with higher rates of teen births; more clinics per capita are associated with fewer teens having children. I find an even stronger relationship between clinic prevalence and STD diagnoses. That is, the more Planned Parenthood clinics in a state in a given year, the fewer teen births and STD diagnoses. I find similar effects of Planned Parenthood clinic access on the health outcomes of HIV diagnoses and reliance on emergency room care.
Yaver has worked to control for factors like poverty that could skew her findings, but she acknowledges that:
Other factors are at work as well. For instance, Planned Parenthood clinics are not randomly distributed. States that have more could very well have other social programs that help reduce the rate of teen births and STDs. Although I account in the statistical model for whether states mandate the provision of sex education as opposed to abstinence-only, and there does not appear to be a strong association between Planned Parenthood clinic access and the number of hospital beds per capita, other health and social program delivery could affect these outcomes.
It seems like the simplest and best way to test if the relationship between more Planned Parenthood clinics and fewer teen births and STD diagnoses is not just correlation but causation would be to drop a whole bunch of extra clinics into some states that currently don’t have many of them, and come back in a couple years to check the outcomes. Unfortunately, Republicans are hell-bent on doing it the opposite way, by closing down as many clinics as they can and waiting to see if teen births and STDs skyrocket. Not that we’ll know if they do, since Republicans will also have shut down avenues for public health research.
Democrats should be saying it loud: Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood are efforts to increase teen parenthood and spread STDs.