BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — According to the pro-choice non-profit Guttmacher Institute, nearly 35,000 births in Alabama in 2010 were publicly funded, the majority of which were the result of unplanned pregnancies.
The Institute estimates that every child and mother given public assistance in Alabama will receive a total of $17,541 from Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Alabama’s All Kids program during the first five years of the child’s life.
In 2010, the year for which the most recent data is available, 51% of all births across the US were paid for by Medicaid or another public insurance program.
Using data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) “Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System” (PRAMS) survey, Guttmacher found that 61.6% of children born from unplanned pregnancies in Alabama received public funding, slightly lower than the national average of 67.8%.
The study says that in Alabama, the state paid $72.6 million and the federal government paid $250.5 million to care for the children resulting from unplanned pregnancies.
The public cost of these pregnancies may be significant, but it’s really only one part of the equation.
While the Guttmacher Institute, an offshoot of Planned Parenthood, rightly considers the advantages to decreasing the number of unintended pregnancies, it fails to consider the overall economic benefit of sustainable population growth, and the damage done to the US economy by its own support of abortion.
According to the pro-life group National Right to Life, the approximately 51 million abortions performed since Roe v. Wade in 1976 have cost the economy upwards of $400 billion in wages alone that would have been paid, had those children been allowed to be born.
The estimated 500,000 children aborted in Alabama since 1973 could have brought the state’s population up to nearly 5.5 million, adding billions more in tax revenue to state coffers.
In 2013 the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative think tank based in Birmingham, published a “By the Numbers” feature, showing just how different Alabama could look today if Roe v. Wade hadn’t made abortion legal.
That same year, the Alabama State Legislature passed the Alabama Women’s Health and Safety Act, which required abortion providers to adhere to many of the standards of other healthcare providers. The law was later ruled unconstitutional by US District Judge Myron Thompson because it would close 3 of Alabama’s five remaining abortion clinics, which Thompson said unduly restricted the “right” to an abortion.
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— Elizabeth BeShears (@LizEBeesh) January 21, 2015
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