The New Hampshire House recently passed a bill which would prohibit the state from contracting with any organization that performs abortions. While supporters claim that their goal is to stop public funds from paying for abortions, the bill could put the overall health of lower-income women in jeopardy:

The state’s largest hospitals are suing the Department of Health and Human Services over reductions in provider payments, said Lisabritt Solsky, deputy director of the state Medicaid program, calling into question whether Medicaid patients have adequate access to medical services. “Our concern is a bill like this pours gasoline on that fire,” she said.

She said 24 of the state’s 26 acute-care hospitals perform abortions as defined in the bill. Only Catholic Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital do not. If the bill became law, the 24 hospitals would either have to create separate facilities and affiliates to provide those services, or they could not contract with Health and Human Services. [...]

Solsky said the issue is adequate access to medical services for Medicaid patients. If the hospitals cannot contract with the state to provide services, where are Medicaid patients going to receive care, she asked.

As Health and Human Services Commissioner Nicholas Toumpas wrote, the bill could cause “dis-enrollment from the Medicaid program potentially resulting in significant disruption to the acute care system.” A group like Planned Parenthood, which claims abortion makes up only three to five percent of the medical services it provides, would not qualify for any government assistance and would not be able to provide the same level of assistance to lower-income women. As Jennifer Frizzell, policy director for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, put it, “For six out of 10 women, we are the primary source of their medical care.” Frizzell claimed that no other group could take their place if their funding was cut.

The bill is currently before a Senate committee, which has not made a recommendation. Its fate is unclear; Gov. John Lynch (D), an abortion-rights advocate, has not commented on the bill as of yet.

-Zachary Bernstein

In the past month, when dismissing questions surrounding their stance on women’s health, Republicans have argued that women don’t care about contraception because a majority are focused on more immediate economic concerns. But the GOP fails to realize that economics and women’s access to reproductive health, are inextricably linked and that expanding the availability of family planning services increases labor force participation , education attainment in women and makes for fiscally sound budget policy.

Despite these benefits, the national Republican party has advanced legislation to limit women’s access to preventive health services and multiple states have introduced GOP-backed measures to restrict access to family planning. Here are just some of the very real economic consequences of this war on women’s health:

– $4 Billion: According to a study released by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies, unplanned pregnancies total $4 billion a year in direct medical costs alone. This includes only the costs that are associated with the births ($3.9 billion) and miscarriages ($266 million) that result from nearly 3 million unplanned pregnancies each year.

– $12 Billion: A study conducted by the Brookings Institution estimates that American taxpayers spend upwards of $12 billion each year to provide medical care for 1.25 million unintended pregnancies through programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This sum includes $251 million on fetal losses (which are commonly known as miscarriages); roughly $6 billion on births; and another $6 billion on infant medical care.

– $10,000: The average cost per publicly financed unintended pregnancy is nearly $10,000.

– $55.6 Million: In a state like Oklahoma, for example, which had the 10th-highest percentage of births of unplanned babies in 2006, and where “Medicaid paid for the treatment and delivery costs for more than 70 percent of the 26,100 unintended pregnancies that year…the price tag for prenatal and post-partum care for the woman and infant was $55.6 million while the federal government’s share of those costs was $117.6 million.”

– $11 Billion: On a national scale, federal and state government costs for unintended pregnancies jumped to upwards of $11 billion.

Although it may seem counterintuitive to the GOP, reducing barriers to contraception access is more fiscally sound than erecting new hurdles. In 2008 alone, contraceptive services helped to avert some 973,000 unintended pregnancies, which would have resulted in 433,000 unplanned births and 406,000 abortions. Federal and state governments save on average $4.3 billion each year from publicly funded family planning services, while contraceptive use saves nearly $19 billion in direct medical costs each year. The National Business Group on Health reports that most of its 346 members include contraception in their plans because it saves money. Employers who cover birth control, at an average cost of about $39 per female employee per year, end up saving about $9,000 per female employee in any two-year period compared to those who don’t.

– Fatima Najiy

FORT DODGE, Iowa – The right-wing social conservative group The FAMiLY Leader is pushing Iowa Republicans to restrict any state tax dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood does not get state money for abortions, “it does get at least $6 million in state tax dollars as reimbursement for providing birth control and reproductive health exams to poor women.” And now, because the Iowa Republicans are plotting to take that away, women are making their voices heard.

An elderly woman from central Iowa had harsh words for Rep. Steve King (R-IA) at a town hall meeting Tuesday, reprimanding the congressman for his attacks on the women’s health provider Planned Parenthood. During his time in Congress, King has been one of the most outspoken critics of Planned Parenthood for providing abortion services. The vast majority of Planned Parenthood’s services — 97 percent — don’t involve abortion, but other women’s health needs like mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and STI tests.

The constituent, Shirley Grant, assailed King for wanting to defund Planned Parenthood and make it harder for women to get health care and “take charge of their destiny.” Said Grant, “I find it very offensive that men think they can tell women what to do with their own life.”

GRANT: When women want pro-choice and want to take charge of their destiny, you and your cohorts want to take funding away from Planned Parenthood. My daughter says, “throw out the word ‘birth control,’ Mom. Planned Parenthood isn’t that.” She says it’s for hormone replacement and that means you use those pills for many, many, many different areas of women’s lives. I find it very offensive that men think they can tell women what to do with their own life.

Watch the exchange, as well as Grant’s reaction afterwards:

ThinkProgress spoke with King on Monday about whether right-wing rhetoric may have played any part in motivating the bombing this week of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin. Though King wasn’t familiar with the incident, he shrugged off the idea that Republican attacks bore any responsibility, saying his main concern was for the “unborn babies. That’s where our focus needs to be.”

Republican women like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) are stepping in to defend the vital services provided by Planned Parenthood. “The preventive health care [that] they’re doing, we need to provide those services, absolutely,” she told MSNBC last month.

Yesterday, the Alabama House’s General Fund budget committee approved a budget for 2013 that’s just under $1.4 billion. To balance the budget, legislators approved drastic cuts public health, and other human services instead of seeking revenue increases, and Medicaid will be particularly hard hit. On top of the $68 million that has already been cut, Alabama’s Medicaid program will lose an additional 30 percent, or $175 million, in FY 2013, leaving it with a budget of $400 million.

State Health Officer Don Williamson, who heads the Alabama public health department, said he will report to lawmakers next week if Alabama can satisfy minimum federal Medicaid standards under the proposed budget. “I don’t think there’s any way in the world any human being can make this budget work at $400 million without serious cuts to someone,” Williamson said. And because dialysis treatment could be on the chopping block, he warned legislators during the budget hearing that the cuts could lead to deaths, according to Alabama Arise:

The state is not required to cover dialysis treatments under Medicaid, but Williamson said cuts to the $4.5 million that the state spends on those services would be unrealistic because they would be tantamount to a death sentence for those patients. “I know exactly what happens if you don’t dialysize people,” Williamson said. “They’re dead in two weeks.”

Committee chairman Rep. Jim Barton (R) admitted that the budget situation is dire. “There isn’t much about this budget that is pleasing to the eye,” he said. But one legislator pointed out that Alabama cannot survive for long on a cuts-only system for balancing the budget. “At some point, we’re going to have to have some courage in this body and look at revenue-generating measures,” Rep. Merika Coleman (D) said.

The men in the Republican Party may not think they’re fighting a “war on women,” but its female senators certainly do. Yesterday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) joined Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Kay Bailey Hutchison in criticizing the GOP’s push for legislation to restrict access to contraception and other basic health care services:

“It makes no sense to make this attack on women,” she said at a local Chamber of Commerce luncheon. “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Murkowski — who recently said she regretted her vote for the anti-woman Blunt amendment — promised to fight for Planned Parenthood funding and also spoke out against Rush Limbaugh’s attack of Sandra Fluke, adding, “To have those kind of slurs against a woman … you had candidates who want to be our president not say, ‘That’s wrong. That’s offensive.’ They did not condemn the rhetoric.”

Republicans have been taking a curious tack in defending accusations of their “war on women.” Instead of arguing flat-out that their women’s health policies are beneficial to, or supported by, women, they argue that women won’t vote on issues such as contraception. Therefore, they’ve concluded, their views on women’s health won’t matter.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) went on The View early this week arguing that “women don’t care about contraception.” And on Wednesday, in his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, presidential candidate Mitt Romney said:

In the final analysis I will win by having the support of men and women, in the battleground states and across the country. That will be by focusing on the issues that women and men care most about. My wife has the occasion to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves. They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school, or to practice and so forth.

It’s telling that the Republicans won’t stand up for their views on contraception — which they want to severely limit or eliminate. But polling and analysis show that women will indeed vote on women’s health issues. In fact, according to a recent Gallup poll of swing state voters, “women voters, by a 20-percentage-point margin, 55% to 35%, are significantly more likely than men to rate government policies relating to birth control as important.” This same poll pointed to a female-driven bump in favor of President Obama.

But moreover, women’s health issues affect each of the categories that Republicans have deemed (and, yes, polls have confirmed) will define the election: Health care, the economy, and the federal budget/national debt are all in some way tied to that “retro debate” on women’s health.

Contraception affects each of those categories– and here’s how:

Contraception is good for the economy. Access to contraceptives has afforded women the opportunity to hold off on having children until they’re ready, giving them a chance to have a career. Subsequently, the American economy has grown by 25 percent: Women held 37 percent of all jobs in 1979– they now hold almost half. And it’s not over. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women are “projected to account for 51 percent of the increase in total labor force growth between 2008 and 2018.”

Access to contraceptives has helped women make more money. Contraceptives help grow women’s wages, and bring us closer to pay equality. The gender pay gap shrunk significantly — by 30 percent — because of the pill. While it’s still not up to snuff, denial of access to contraceptives wouldn’t help the pay gap close. Add to that the expense of birth control, and women’s wallets could be a lot lighter.

Birth control saves taxpayers money and reduces America’s debt. A Brookings report “estimate[s] that taxpayer spending on Medicaid-subsidized medical care related to unintended pregnancy totals more than $12 billion annually.” By decreasing unplanned pregnancies, there are fewer mothers who look to the government for assistance.

Contraception is health care. Women strongly consider health care one of the most important political issues, so then it’s only natural that contraception should be too. Access to contraception not only controls cost of women’s health care by reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, it is used as a medication for ovarian cysts, certain types of cancer, early menopause, severe acne, extreme cramps, and many other health complications women face.