Health Affairs Blog: The crucial importance of Title X
Guttmacher Institute
Health Affairs Blog: The crucial importance of Title X
The Title X national family planning program was created 45 years ago with broad bipartisan support. Today, Congress has Title X—still the only federal grant program dedicated entirely to family planning and related preventive health care—in its sights for severe funding cuts or even elimination.
The U.S. House of Representatives has proposed ending the program for the fifth year in a row, and the U.S. Senate is recommending a sizable reduction to Title X’s budget. In addition, while legislation aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, whose health centers serve one-third of Title X clients nationally, failed to pass in the Senate in August, many in Congress remain committed to defunding the organization. These ideologically driven proposals come despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating the tremendous benefits of investing in Title X and the publicly funded family planning network writ large.
The Impact of Title X
According to the Office of Population Affairs, which administers the program, nearly 4,200 individual service sites—including Planned Parenthood health centers, sites operated by health departments, community health centers, and independent family planning agencies—were supported by Title X grant funding in 2013; those sites served 4.6 million clients (See the infographic Title X Makes a Difference).
Guttmacher research released in July 2015 on the need for and delivery of publicly supported family planning services shows that in 2013, the Title X network met one-fifth of U.S. women’s need for publicly funded family planning services. (This analysis is based on tabulations of population data from the census bureau, the American Community Survey and the nationally representative National Survey of Family Growth to estimate the numbers of women needing publicly funded care; it draws upon the 2013 Family Planning Annual Report, published by the Office of Population Affairs, for data on numbers of women receiving services from Title X-funded sites.)
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