Nicholas Kristof discusses Poverty and the Pill in Africa, where many women have never even heard of contraception:
Making contraception available to all these women worldwide would cost less than $4 billion, Guttmacher said in an important study published last year. That’s about what the United States is spending every two weeks on our military force in Afghanistan.
What’s more, each dollar spent on contraception would actually reduce total medical spending by $1.40 by reducing sums spent on unplanned births and abortions, the study said.
If contraception were broadly available in poor countries, the report said, more than 50 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted annually. One result would be 25 million fewer abortions per year. Another would be saving the lives of as many as 150,000 women who now die annually in childbirth.
Family planning has stalled since the 1980s. Republican administrations cut off all American financing for the United Nations Population Fund, the main international agency supporting family-planning programs. Paradoxically, conservative hostility to some family-planning programs almost certainly resulted in more abortions.
The Obama administration has restored that financing, and it should make a priority of broader access to contraception (and to girls’ education, which may be the most effective contraceptive of all).
In fairness, family planning is harder than it looks. Many impoverished men and women, especially those without education, want babies more than contraceptives. As Mitch and I drove through villages, we asked many women how many babies they would ideally have. Most said five or six, and a few said 10.
Parents want many children partly because they expect some to die. So mosquito nets, vaccinations and other steps to reduce child mortality also help to create an environment where family planning is more readily accepted.
(Hat tip to Steve Sailer.)
Fairly simplistic, as I would expect from Kristhof. Does he not understand that a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan just might give women fewer choices about things like contraception?
It’s clear that any and all military spending — by the US, at least — is considered wasteful by the left, and I have to roll my eyes at snarky comments to that effect, but I wouldn’t pretend that the US is buying much women’s empowerment per dollar spent in Afghanistan, either.