As Congress considers the GOP’s American Health Care Act, there are likely many people out there who don’t know that the proposed legislation calls for the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
I asked Meena Chelvakumar, MD, a family medicine physician and a VA Health Services Research and Development Fellow here at Stanford Health Policy, to weigh in on what the national health-care organization means to women, and to those physicians who focus on women’s health care. She writes in this Medium blog post that Planned Parenthood is “the most prominent safety-net provider of women’s reproductive and sexual health services in the country" and explains:
The argument for blocking federal funds for this organization from those who back the AHCA primarily focuses on the organization’s potential interchangeability of federal funding with non-federal funding for abortion services... Only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s operations are devoted to abortion; the remaining services include screenings for various cancers and STDs, family planning and contraception for women and men, and reproductive health research and education.
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Though Planned Parenthood centers only make up 10 percent of publicly supported safety-net family planning centers, they serve 36 percent of the patients who receive publicly-supported contraceptives from these facilities. Additionally in 21 percent of the counties where a Planned Parenthood is present, it is the sole provider of contraceptive services for low-income women. In 68 percent of counties, Planned Parenthood provides contraception for at least half of these women.
Chelvakumar concludes that "low-income, marginalized women and families would suffer the most" if Planned Parenthood services were not available.
Previously: The current state of women’s health in the United States? Uncertain
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