New York Times Columnist Charles Blow writes about the GOP's effort to defund family-planning services, calling it "savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent."
Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children's welfare. They can't be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it's in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.
[...]
And it doesn't even make economic sense. A 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies estimated that premature births cost the country at least $26 billion a year. At that rate, reducing the number of premature births by just 10 percent would save thousands of babies and $2.6 billion — more than the proposed cuts to the programs listed, programs that also provide a wide variety of other services.
I agree with Blow that it's savagely immoral. Defunding Planned Parenthood and Title X because of abortion, in part on the basis of doctored hoax videos, eliminates the only access to health care for many low-income women. Only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's funds go to abortion, none of which are paid for by taxpayer dollars. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 4.7 million women obtained care at a Title X-funded facility in 2008, and "six in 10 women who obtain care at a Title X–supported center consider it to be their usual source of medical care." More than preventing abortions, Republicans are simply making it harder for low-income women to get the care they need.
It is not, however, "inconsistent." Anti-choice Republicans believe that women should be forced to carry pregnancies to term and that they should take care of their children on their own without any help from the state. They believe government's role ends at guaranteeing that a fetus will be born and ends once that has taken place.
Forcing women to carry pregnancies to term and defunding health-care services for 4.7 million people is "savagely immoral," but it's not inconsistent with the Republican worldview. But I don't blame Blow for making the argument -- it's one of the weirder aspects of our political circumstances that being a hypocrite is a much greater moral failing than being deeply cruel.
