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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
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