The Impact of Publicly Funded Family Planning Clinic Services on Unintended Pregnancies and Government Cost Savings

Publicly funded family planning clinics serve millions of low-income women each year, providing a range of critical preventive services and enabling women to avoid unintended pregnancies. It is important to quantify the impact and cost-effectiveness of such services, in addition to these health benefits. Using a methodology similar to prior cost-benefit analyses, we estimated the numbers of unintended pregnancies prevented by all U. S. publicly funded family planning clinics in 2004, nationally (1. 4 million pregnancies) and for each state. We also compared the actual costs of providing these services (1. 4 billion) with the anticipated public-sector costs for maternity and infant care among the Medicaid-eligible women whose births were averted (5. 7 billion) to calculate net public-sector savings (4. 3 billion). Thus, public expenditures for family planning care not only help women to achieve their childbearing goals, but they also save public dollars: Our calculations indicate that for every 1 spent, 4. 02 is saved.