Screening & Prevention
Family Planning Clinics Provide 25% Of All Family Planning Services, Study Says
October, 2000 -- A new report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, titled Fulfilling the Promise: Public Policy and U.S. Family Planning Clinics, "brings together more than five years of research and analysis about publicly funded family planning clinics" to conclude the following:
- The nation's 7,000 clinics serve 25% of women in the United States who seek birth control from a health care professional each year, and assist one in seven women of reproductive age who receive Pap smears and pelvic examinations. Family planning clinics also account for 25% of HIV tests and one in three visits for other STD services among women of reproductive age.
- Publicly funded family planning services prevent 1.3 million unintended pregnancies each year and have "played a key role in helping to eliminate historic differences in the level of contraceptive use based on income and race."
- Over the past two decades, clinics funded by Title X, constituting more than 4,000 clinics, have "helped women avoid 20 million unintended pregnancies, nine million of which would have ended in abortion; 5.5 million of these pregnancies would have occurred among teenagers and would have raised the number of teen pregnancies for this period by 20%."
- Over the past 20 years, approximately 54.4 million breast examinations were performed at Title X-funded clinics. In addition, 57.3 Million Pap smears were conducted at these clinics, which "resulted in the early detection of as many as 55,000 cases of invasive cervical cancer," and 19 million diagnostic tests for STDs were conducted between 1995 and 1998.Sara Seims, president of AGI, said, "Federal funding for family planning has made it possible for millions of low-income women and teenagers to receive the high-quality, confidential family planning and related reproductive health care they need. Yet these services remain under sustained political attack. Renewed political and financial commitment to making high-quality family planning services available to all who want them is as crucial to meeting the needs of women and men today as it has been in the past" (AGI release, 10/3).
