Two-Thirds of Unintended Births Are Paid For by the Government

As I wrote on Monday, unintended pregnancy is increasingly concentrated among lower-income women. That suggests a lot of the costs for those pregnancies will be covered by public health care systems such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But even knowing that, it's still surprising to read a recent report from the Guttmacher Institute that shows exactly how much the government has to step in to cover the costs of unintended childbirth. In 2010, more than half of all births in the U.S. were covered by public health insurance. Unintended pregnancy was a huge driver of this phenomenon. “Public insurance programs paid for 68% of the 1.5 million unplanned births that year,” the fact sheet from Guttmacher reads, “compared with 38% of planned births.”

Pregnancy-related medical care isn't cheap. Total government expenditures on unintended pregnancy in 2010 totaled $21 billion, or approximately $336 for every woman age 15-44 in the country. That's an important number to keep in mind when you hear Republicans touting their willingness to slash family planning funding or even just denying that there's a need to make contraception more affordable: For less than what we spend on the costs of unintended pregnancy, we could make sure every woman who wants reliable contraception can get it. In fact, as Guttmacher notes, “In the absence of the current U.S. publicly funded family planning effort, the public costs of unintended pregnancies in 2010 might have been 75% higher.”

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