Call the pink hats silly if you like, but we stand proudly with the men and women across the world who will don fuchsia headgear and march Saturday for the basic reproductive rights that empower women.
We stand with women everywhere who, on average, as the Guttmacher Institute calculates, “will spend close to three years pregnant, postpartum or attempting to be pregnant, and about three decades — more than three-quarters of her reproductive life — trying to avoid an unintended pregnancy.”
Even for women who have financial means, family planning is still — in 2017 — difficult to navigate.
Accessing contraception is an emotional endeavor, full of uncertainty and stigmas. Patients can face long wait times to see a provider even for annual cancer screenings and especially if using Medicaid.
The Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and the one in Denver are about more than this single issue, but one force driving women to the streets in protest is the simple idea that women’s health care should be covered by insurance, readily available, and not subject to the whims of politics.
Republicans have a clear mandate to lead Congress and the White House, and some have made no secret their distaste for America’s legal and safe abortions, and even some contraception-based family planning programs.
Planned Parenthood has been targeted both because the nationwide organization is among the few remaining providers of abortions, and also because of their political activism through a separate political non-profit.
But we urge GOP leaders who might have once been targeted by the “war on women” rallying cry to not punish women who need access to services because of the political actions of a few.
To refuse to allow women who have Medicaid or rely on other federal funding sources like Title X to access Planned Parenthood health providers would not accomplish the goal of stopping abortions. Because of federal and several state funding bans, most abortions have long been privately funded.
Of the roughly 100,000 patients last year who went to 29 clinics run by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains for care, 10,000 were seeking abortion services, or 10 percent. All of those abortions are done before 15 weeks of gestation. The remaining 90,000 unique patients sought other services.
What defunding Planned Parenthood would do is make accessing family planning more difficult.
Colorado conducted its own experiment through Title X family planning clinics (these clinics in Colorado are not affiliated with Planned Parenthood) in part using private donations to offer free long-acting birth control for teens and low-income patients.
The teen birthrate fell by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The rate of abortions fell by 42 percent.
These programs work and should receive more support, not less.
We would hope Republicans would also see the wisdom in maintaining that commitment as they work to fix our broken health care system.
Forty-four years have passed since Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that the right of privacy founded in the Constitution “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the state would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent.”
That legal argument failed to persuade many then that abortion should be legal, and we’re not here to persuade those same opponents now despite our support of a woman’s right to choose.
But perhaps a few million marchers, and their silly pink hats, can send a serious message about not regressing when it comes to constructive conversations about family planning and women’s health.
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