Orange County Voices : COMMENTARY ON FAMILY PLANNING : Title X Funding Should Be Spared in Congressional Budget Cuts : The program has helped 20,700 women locally and is the nation’s main effort to reduce unintended pregnancy.

During the current effort to balance the federal budget, Congress has looked to public health and welfare programs as a means of cutting expenditures. On July 20, the House Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate the Title X family planning program.

In our local community, Title X funds have enabled Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties to provide 20,744 patients with preventive medical services in 1994; 16,719 of those patients have incomes that are less than 150% of the federal poverty level.

Clinics that receive Title X funds are the only source of family planning services for 83% of the women they serve. Without Title X resources, these women would be denied access to health care services and would be at high risk for unintended pregnancy.

President Richard M. Nixon signed Title X of the Public Health Service Act into law in 1970, and the law has been reauthorized six times with broad bipartisan support. Title X remains the nation’s primary programmatic effort to reduce unintended pregnancy, providing funding for contraception and other clinical services for low-income women.

Health care providers offer contraceptive services, family planning counseling, prenatal care and a wide range of preventive care that is critical to women’s health. These allocated funds help women avoid the enormous personal, medical and social costs of unintended pregnancy and unwanted births.

Title X has been the core of the national family planning policy for 25 years. Medical centers that receive Title X funds are the only source of health care for millions of women.

More than 5,000 health centers throughout the country rely on Title X family planning program funding to provide critical, preventive health services to low-income women. Funding this program helps to ensure access to preventive reproductive care and other health services for them and their families.

A recent American Journal of Public Health editorial stated that “preventing unintended pregnancy is an unambiguously desirable national goal: It saves economic resources, mitigates human misery and reduces the need for recourse to induced abortion.”

Planned Parenthood’s health centers that receive Title X funding provide a full range of reproductive health care. These preventive medical services include physical examinations, cancer screening and mammography, testing for sexually transmitted infections and HIV, prenatal care, education and counseling services.

Contrary to anti-choice rhetoric, no Title X money is used to provide abortion services and all Title X funds specifically provide contraception and other services that help low-income women and teens prevent unintended pregnancies.

Drs. Claire Brindis and Carol Korenbrot of the University of California at San Francisco have concluded, in a recent study on the cost effectiveness of family planning expenditures, that for each dollar spent to provide contraceptive services, the state and federal governments saved an average of $5.05. These public financial savings combine with the personal, emotional and financial impacts on individual women and their families to prove the benefits of comprehensive family planning programs.

However, between 1980 and 1990, the federal government cut funding for Title X by over 70% in real dollars. The program has continued through annual appropriations, but has suffered from periodic cuts.

Title X currently serves only half of the women and men who are eligible for services because of funding constraints imposed upon nonprofit health care agencies.

These limitations strain the public health care system, and further reductions have the potential of crippling preventive care services in our local community.

As Orange County remains mired in bankruptcy, the need for other agencies to fill the gaps in services will increase.

Title X also funds many innovative health education programs that support counseling, education and outreach to young people. These programs encourage adolescents to take personal responsibility for their health while teaching them the skills to delay sexual activity and avoid unintended pregnancy. The professional health educators at Planned Parenthood reached more than 46,000 young people last year with information that empowers and protects them.

Title X is essential to the health of women, their families and society. In 1992, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) lamented that the policies restricting access to family planning “only exacerbate the current crisis of unwanted pregnancy and abortion and [do] nothing to solve these problems.” The country requires a national reproductive health strategy that actively promotes the prevention of unintended pregnancies.

Title X remains a cost-effective public health strategy that should be strengthened rather than undermined. This program deserves to receive the traditional bipartisan support it has earned throughout the past 25 years.

Congress should reverse the action by the House Appropriations Committee and allow Title X to continue as part of a cost-effective national strategy for addressing the crisis of unwanted pregnancies in our local community.