Editorial from The Record

THERE ARE dozens of painful program cuts in Governor Christie’s tentative state budget for next year. We support many of these proposals, because we believe it’s high time to end New Jersey’s tax-and-spend-way-too-much ways.

But some state programs are too important and provide so much bang for our bucks, cutbacks are pound-foolish. We put state funding for family planning squarely in that category.

The governor has proposed cutting all $7.5 million in state family planning funds from next year’s budget, money that goes to pay for reproductive health education, contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, HIV tests and prenatal care for under- and uninsured low-income women. The funds do not pay for abortions — in fact, they prevent them, nearly 19,000 last year alone, along with 40,000 unintended pregnancies, according to advocates.

Some 140,000 patients were served at 58 clinics statewide last year, run variously by non-profit agencies such as Planned Parenthood and county health departments. These clinics, including in Hackensack and Paterson, are part of a network of 7,700 centers nationwide and provide one-sixth of all pelvic exams and Pap smears in a given year.

The benefits from them are enormous — in terms of both public health and individual families.

For every dollar invested in these services, taxpayers save an estimated $4 in Medicaid-related costs. Testing and treating sexually transmitted diseases impedes their ability to spread. Routine cancer screenings promote early detection and intervention. Reproductive planning and prenatal care allow women to space their pregnancies and support their and their children’s health from conception on.

These services are desperately needed — especially by the low-income women, predominantly of color, who rely on these clinics most. The stark fact remains that in New Jersey, an African-American infant is twice as likely to die before his or her first birthday as a white infant.

And as a nation, we rank shockingly low when it comes to maternal health: 28th, just after Croatia, according to a report released this month by Save the Children. Researchers found American women are five times as likely to die of pregnancy-related causes as women in Bosnia or Greece. American children are half as likely to live to age 5 as children in Finland or Singapore.

Four Democratic female legislators — state Sen. Loretta Weinberg and Assemblywomen Valerie Vainieri Huttle, Linda Stender and Linda Greenstein — are calling for family planning funding to be restored. They have proposed a series of reasonable alternatives that the Legislature should study closely, including diverting some of a planned funding increase for hospital charity care, allowing family planning clinics to apply for state grants, using federal funds earmarked for indigent care or using a one-time bonus payment by the federal government intended for the FamilyCare insurance program for poor children.

As they stand, the planned cuts could force some clinics to close, “creating a further influx of charity care cases for our hospitals and forcing them to provide expensive services that could have been avoided if these patients had access to simple preventative care,” Weinberg said in a statement. “The numbers speak for themselves.”

We agree. Fund family planning in New Jersey.

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