Skip to main content

The economics of contraception

University of Massachusetts economics professor Nancy Folbre, in an Economix (New York Times) blog post, nicely combines several observations about the benefit of providing women with free contraceptives.

Her observations?
  1. "[U]nintended pregnancy costs American taxpayers roughly $11 billion each year."
  2. The cost of unintended pregnancies affect poor young women more than others and exacerbates the cycle of poverty for the mother and her child(ren). 
  3. Insights from the field of behavioral economics suggest that simply expecting women/couples to engage in perfectly strategic behavior when it comes to preventing unintended pregnancy-- in particular, securing and using contraception effectively-- is unrealistic. 
  4. 'Pre-emptive' birth control, like LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), that have very low use error (i.e., people don't mess up using it properly), overcome this problem. 
  5. As a result, it is not surprising that the recent St. Louis study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that free distribution of LARCs to women who ask for them correlates with a decline in unintended pregnancy, teen pregnancy rates, and abortion rates. 
  6. Government spending on family planning, therefore, is a good "investment." 
Why don't Republicans, she asks, buy into government-sponsored family planning, given that they "typically embrace cost-benefit analysis"? This she leaves to the reader's imagination. 

She is making a rhetorical point, of course. 

That being said, I don't think this is so hard to understand. Identifying the policy that best gets us from point A to point B is only part of the lawmaking calculus. In this case, two competing considerations trump policy efficacy: Moral opposition to contraception and ideological opposition to a large social welfare state. 

Links:

The New York Times Economix blog: Contraceptive Economics

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Medically necessary abortions: The battle of the experts

Apparently, Representative Joe Walsh is not entirely alone! The assertion that an abortion is never medically necessary has been floating around in the pro-life universe for at least a little while. We are now witnessing a battle of the experts. One the one side is Joe Walsh and friends. Walsh himself released a pdf document with quotations from several doctors-- including some historically prominent pro-choice doctors, like Alan Guttmacher-- making the 'never medically necessary' claim seem quite reasonable. Also on Walsh's side are several doctors  who particpated in a recent "International Symposium on Maternal Health" in Dublin. Ireland, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 1992 , has a total ban on abortion. Irish pro-lifers want the country's politicians to resist pressure to implement even a life exception, so the question of medical necessity is directly relevant there. The "Dublin Declaration," released after the S...

Did "tax-funded abortion pills" cause the Newtown tragedy?

Of course not. But this is the kind of nonsense we get when people shamelessly piggyback on a tragedy to score political or culture war points. We also get this kind of analysis when someone is paid to analyze events on cue but has nothing of substance to say regarding something terrible and complex. Watch Mike Huckabee's statement here: I understand Huckabee is trying to make a larger point about the culture, rather than drawing a direct line from the ACA's contraceptive mandate-- which does not mandate taxpayer funding of abortion pills, by the way-- to the Newtown massacre. Still, this is what happens when a tragedy occurs: We extrapolate from an isolated event and determine that it encapsulates, or is the ultimate representation of, something about our society that must be addressed. It is possible, however, that an event is sui generis and cannot then serve as a platform for useful long-term policy reform.  We reduce the cause of a tragedy-- which may ultimat...