A Pregnant Pause To Consider The GOP War On Women

Want to know why Republicans are really going after Planned Parenthood?  Maybe this will shed some light on the situation.

Unintended pregnancies, which make up nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States, are increasingly concentrated among low-income women, a study showed on Wednesday.


Unplanned pregnancies have skyrocketed among poor women in recent years even as such pregnancies among their affluent peers have dropped, according to the study, to be published in the online edition of the journal Contraception.

Researchers from the Guttmacher Institute found the unintended pregnancy rate among women with incomes below the federal poverty line jumped by 50 percent between 1994 and 2006, the latest date available, from 88 per 1,000 to 132.

Meanwhile, the unplanned pregnancy rate among women with incomes at least 200 percent above the poverty line fell 29 percent from 34 per 1,000 to 24, the researchers found, using data from the federal National Survey of Family Growth.

Of the 6.7 million pregnancies tracked in 2006, some 49 percent were unintended, up from 47 percent in 1994, according to the women themselves.

So, wealthier women are choosing to use contraception.  Meanwhile, poor women are needing it more.  This isn't a public health problem to conservatives, poor women should just stop having sex.  The larger issue is of course Planned Parenthood is being targeted for abortions, but conservatives want all women's health funding stripped from the organization regardless of the whole contraception angle...which of course would prevent unintended pregnancies and abortions as a result.  The only logical conclusion is that it's contraception for poor women that conservatives are really after.  They want poor women to remain poor and pregnant, where it's difficult to improve your economic situation.

So there's a growing epidemic of unintended pregnancies among poor woemn, and the GOP wants to actively make it worse.

Ask yourself why that is.