President Bush got elected the first time on a platform of "compassionate conservatism." Five years later, Karen Pearl of Planned Parenthood is struggling to find the compassion in his 2006 budget. In addition to increasing funding for ineffective abstinence-only education for teens, he cut the Title X funding that pays for family planning for low-income people. And while nearly everyone can agree that the best way to prevent abortions is through better contraception, Bush won't fully fund prorgrams that encourage it. So much for compassion.
Karen Pearl is interim president Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Some of you may remember the catchphrase “compassionate conservatism” from George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign. Anyone who persists in believing that there’s more to this than a speechwriter’s quest for alliteration should take a long look at President Bush’s behemoth $2.6 trillion budget for fiscal year 2006.
A budget with a "T" after the number should be able to provide for the health and welfare of our neediest citizens, but Bush's budget leaves the most powerless among us—children and the poor—out in the cold.
Let’s start with our kids. Upon unveiling his budget on February 7, Bush said, “Taxpayers in America don’t want us spending their money on something that’s not achieving results.” That's almost certainly true, but it has become increasingly clear that President Bush is merely paying us all lip service while he panders to the conservative right by funding programs that have already been proven ineffective. Otherwise, why would he request an additional $39 million for abstinence-only sex education programs, bringing the grand total for these dangerous and ineffective curricula to a whopping $205.5 million?
To say that these programs are not getting results is an understatement. Consider: Teens who participate in abstinence-only programs may abstain from intercourse longer than others, although even that much is uncertain. But the vast majority of them do have premarital sex, and when they do, they are significantly less likely to use condoms and birth control than those who have received comprehensive sex education. Abstinence-only education places them at greater risk for unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recently released a report showing that the curricula used by more than two-thirds of federally funded abstinence-only programs contain misleading or downright false information about sexually transmitted infections, contraception and abortion. This, when studies have shown that 75 percent of parents want their children to receive honest information about safer sex and reproductive health care.
And why wouldn’t they? In New York City, where I live, recent headlines have warned of a new, highly aggressive strain of HIV. Our children's lives are on the line, and yet the administration consistently sacrifices scientific truth to narrow ideology, dispensing inaccurate information about the efficacy of condoms and packing government health and science agencies with anti-choice zealots.
Not surprisingly, in a political climate that seeks to reward the rich with permanent tax cuts, the fiscal year 2006 budget also turns its back on the poor. It drastically underfunds Title X, the federal program providing low-income women with quality, affordable family planning and basic reproductive health care.
The president has asked Congress to “flat-fund” Title X at $286 million, just $81 million more than the abstinence-only education budget. Keeping pace with inflation, the Title X budget should be more than twice that—$590 million.
To recap, we have a request for more money for abstinence-only programs, which don’t work, and status quo money for Title X programs, which do work. Now, fasten your seat belts for the big budget cut—Medicaid. Bush proposes to cut $60 billion from the program that has been providing health care to low-income Americans since 1965. The result? These proposed cuts could mean that some people currently on Medicaid would have reduced benefits or fewer protections, like guaranteed coverage of family planning. States will likely have to cut people from the program, which could leave more than a million more Americans without preventative health care.
And while Bush opposes abortion, the Bush budget does all it can to quash preventive measures that can make abortion less necessary. Sound sex education and family planning services would reduce the need for abortion, but Bush isn't interested in funding those programs.
In the end, a budget is just numbers, and numbers often conceal more than they suggest. What matters is what the numbers represent—human lives, human possibility and hope for the future.
Last week we celebrated President’s Day, and I am reminded of the words of one recent president: “We need to make population and family planning household words. We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather are using it as a political steppingstone. If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.”
It wasn't a liberal Democrat who said this. It was President George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Protecting the health and well-being of women and children should be a national goal, not a partisan one. This is something all of us can support.
