Lisa Loving's guest is Robert Walker, Executive Vice President of the Population Institute.
If the current GOP presidential primary campaign is remembered for nothing else, it will be known for the meteoric rise of the "anti-contraception conservatives."
• Rick Santorum thinks states should have the power to ban family planning.
• Mitt Romney wants to eliminate funding for Title X, which helps to provides low-income women with access to family planning and reproductive health services.
• Rick Perry proudly trumpeted the fact that Texas had slashed state support for family planning clinics by two-thirds.
Taxpayers may instinctively applaud such cuts. But every dollar invested in helping women avoid unwanted pregnancies saves $4.02 in Medicaid expenditures that otherwise will be needed for pregnancy-related care.
Furthermore, many fail to realize that eliminating publicly-supported family planning services would actually increase the number of abortions in the U.S. Title X-supported centers alone helped avert 406,200 abortions in 2008 by providing high quality contraception.
"That it has gotten as far as it has in the past 18 months is unnerving," says Robert Walker of the Population Institute. "The escalating assaults on contraception are not only short-sighted financially,” but according to Walker, "they are really a war on women and their reproductive health and rights."
Robert Walker is the Executive Vice President of the Population Institute, which works to promote voluntary family planning and reproductive health services, and to increase awareness of the social, economic, and environmental consequences of rapid population growth.
- KBOO