Reproductive Rights for the Poor--Trying to Get it Right

Medicaid is the federal health insurance program for the poor (funded by both the federal government and states) and back in the 1970s Medicaid rules were established that prohibited a woman on Medicaid from receiving a tubal ligation (then, and still now, a very popular form of female sterilization) without a 30-day waiting period and some other safeguards against being forced into an unwanted sterilization. No problem, right? Well, maybe not. A new study just published in the journal Contraception and reported by futurity.org suggests that by now the policy is working in the wrong direction--creating a situation where women are winding up with unwanted pregnancies. The research team, which included demographers from Princeton and UT-Austin, concluded that:

With the implementation of a revised Medicaid sterilization policy, we estimated that the number of fulfilled sterilization requests would increase by 45%, from 53.3% of all women having their sterilization requests fulfilled to 77.5%. Annually, this increase could potentially lead to over 29,000 unintended pregnancies averted and $215 million saved.

Sounds like policy-change time to me...