Family planning under attack
State can't afford to cut family planning programs:
"Georgia serves fewer than half of the poor women who seek family planning services but cannot afford contraceptives. If the governor and lawmakers approve the $1.2 million cut recommended recently by the Department of Human Resources board, the state will serve even fewer of those women.
The budget cuts will be costly in the long run. Providing family planning services reduces births to mothers not yet ready to have a child. If those babies are conceived, there will be more cases of premature and unhealthy infants as well as more welfare dependency -- both of which are costly, economically as well as socially."
Six preventive programs, including the two relating to women and girls' reproductive health, were put on the chopping block because they lacked what the board labeled "measurable results." Cook says some of the adolescent programs will be tested by the Division of Public Health staff in the next year for their effectiveness.
There are a number of curious things about such an approach, including why it wouldn't be smarter to use available federal welfare funds to keep the programs going until the evaluations are done. Teen pregnancy rates in Georgia (still the seventh-highest in the nation) have dropped 18 percent in the past 10 years, and there's no reason to discount the preventive impact of the adolescent health programs.
Cook may favor cutting those programs because they include information about condom use and other contraceptives, in addition to teaching abstinence. He is CEO of "Choosing the Best," an abstinence-only program used in some schools locally and around the country.

What we have here is an cultural agenda; to prevent women from controlling their bodies and then blaming them for having too many children.