While studying birth control for women in the “safety-net” who wish to plan their pregnancies, we discovered there are unexpected benefits. Affording free or low-cost contraception in current Federal programs creates enormous future social and economic gains. Yet, almost 40% of this population is unserved because, they either cannot afford the most effective birth control methods or do not have access to them. Rather than increasing availability, the current administration is actually reducing funding and availability for the Family Planning providers and their patients.

 

The Society for Prevention of Unplanned Pregnancies was created to educate other organizations and enable them, using our unique financial models, to increase decision maker’s knowledge about the fiscal benefits of Family Planning. Hopefully, this will advance the availability of safe affordable contraception and relevant education for the “safety-net” population of our country that wish to decide when to have their families.

 

 The U.S. government currently spends 2.4 billion dollars on family planning  which at the end of 12 years returns over $176 Billion, from ONLY the first year's funding.   If this funding were to be continued for the next 12 years, the cumulative savings would be more than 2 TRILLION DOLLARS.  In order to be conservative, we used only 50% of the 914,000 births avoided from the programs available.  In addition, we used only 3 of the 79 Federal programs (TAMF, Food Stamps, and Medicare) plus education K-8 in these calculations, as they are the only ones available to almost 100% of the “safety-net” population. 

 

Almost half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended.  We need  to find a well-respected research organizations to expand our findings and include many of the other programs. In this way the damage to Family Planning can be mitigated  With the preliminary numbers we have, the full benefits of Family Planning should be apparent to legislators and should demonstrate to them the benefits of funding birth control and low cost long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) for the over 8,000 women’s health clinics in the U.S.  Then, women in the safety-net who do not wish to become pregnant will be able to plan their family as they wish and create their own future.