PLATFORM : Expensive Misery

Consumers of government programs--welfare, foster care, public-health services and the criminal-justice system--are increasing faster than taxpayers. Ever-escalating medical insurance and hospital costs reflect some of the massive expenses generated by births to teen-agers, drug abusers, AIDS-infected women and others whose children often require lengthy intensive care.

Ironically, antibiotics, which saved children’s lives after World War II, created a burgeoning growth rate among impoverished high-risk families who were denied contraceptive services. Middle-class families could use contraceptives to space their children, while families without money were treated almost like cattle, expected to have yearly offspring.

When my husband interned at the Philadelphia General Hospital in the 1950s, he was gagged by the threat of being fired and blacklisted if he told welfare patients about birth control. The staff actually had to force mothers to nurse their unwanted babies. I worried how these unloved children would turn out. Years later, as a jail volunteer, I learned that yesterday’s neglected, abused children are today’s violent juveniles and tomorrow’s adult criminals.

Even loved children can be disadvantaged when born into baby-a-year families. In the 1960s, I worked as a teacher’s aide helping with the slowest kindergarten groups. What these children had in common was exhausted mothers who never had time to talk or read to them, let alone visit the school, because of yearly pregnancies.

Recently, I met with the Department of Health and Human Services to discuss the managerial and fiscal shortcomings of the federal family-planning program, Title X. A decade of inflation has slashed its buying power by two-thirds, yet, during this time, no Title X administrator has asked Congress for extra funds. In the last 11 years, 1,000 federal contraceptive clinics have been forced to close, leaving 5 million more women at risk of unintended pregnancy.

I heard of no plans to increase funding, even though studies from the University of California, San Francisco, show that each tax dollar spent on contraceptive services saves $12.20 in future medical and social welfare costs.

The confused management of Title X was demonstrated by this astounding statement by the director of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs: “No one knows what works to prevent teen pregnancy.” No wonder the United States is No. 1 in the developed world in teen births and abortions! Obstetricians certainly know what works--programs that empower youth to abstain, or else, to protect themselves with contraceptives. But mainstream public-health providers haven’t had presidential access for 11 years, while anti-contraceptive groups are consulted.

If the President wants American children to be born into health, stability and love, and if he wants to give low-income families the means to avoid welfare and to help their children advance in school, he must act on the advice of health professionals. Otherwise, taxpayers and children alike will continue to suffer the expensive misery that stems from inadequate reproductive health care.