Opinion

Wrong on birth control

Posted June 23, 2017 1:00 am

The Trump administration has recommended defunding Planned Parenthood and drastically curtailing the birth control mandates in Obamacare. These moves threaten to end the progress made in lowering teen pregnancy since 2008. According to the National Center on Health Statistics, teen pregnancy is down 42 percent from a high in 2007.

Obamacare and its increased accessibility to a variety of birth control methods can explain this drop. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, at the urging of the Mike Pence wing of the Republican Party, wants to make such health care less available.

They either want more teen babies or they are resorting to Nancy Reagan's plea to "Just say no," applied here to sex, not drugs. Those words will be no more successful now than they were for Nancy.

I hope cuts to social programs are reversed. We will need them more than ever before with more unwed mothers and their at-risk babies.

Karen Wagner

Rolling Meadows

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