WASHINGTON, D.C., September 2, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The Obama administration’s chief population officer has said the Zika virus and unintended pregnancies – which she called “poor reproductive health outcomes” – should convince American taxpayers to pay for abortifacient contraceptives to be implanted in poor women immediately after giving birth.
“The threat of local spread of Zika virus to the United States in 2016 has elevated the need for expanded access to quality family planning services to an emergency level,” wrote Susan B. Moskosky, acting director of the Office of Population Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a scholarly article published last month.
However, she noted that all but seven of the 1,825 reported cases of Zika infection in the United States were acquired overseas or in a laboratory.
“Too many Americans still have poor reproductive health outcomes,” she continued. “Each year, approximately 2.8 million women have an unintended pregnancy. Approximately 42 percent of these end in abortion.”
She promoted the use of “long-acting reversible methods of contraception (LARC) (i.e., intrauterine devices and implants),” and public payment is “being considered by Medicaid” – in a “noncoercive” manner, Moskosky wrote.
“Only the so-called 'Office of Population Affairs' (which should be called the Office of Population Control) would see the Zika crisis as an ‘opportunity’ to abort, sterilize, and contracept more women,” Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told LifeSiteNews. “The proper response to the Zika threat is to develop a vaccine to protect mothers and babies from its ill effects, or redouble mosquito abatement efforts.”
“Instead, Moskosky wants to prevent pregnancy, which she apparently regards as a disease, altogether,” he said.
Teen pregnancies, Moskosky noted, have fallen, as have all pregnancies. The U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.86, well below the 2.1 replacement level. The nation’s TFR fell to its lowest point in more than a century during the first three months of 2016, to 59.8 births per 1,000 women, the fewest pregnancies since the government began recording that statistic in 1909.
Recent and projected U.S. population increases have come due to historically high immigration levels.
Her recommendation of long-acting hormonal contraceptives concerns pro-life advocates. All LARCs have the potential to induce an early abortion by blocking the implantation of the newly conceived child in the mother’s uterine lining. According to the Life Issues Institute, “in as many as 95 percent of the cases [the IUD] does not prevent fertilization” but blocks implantation.
Pro-life advocates warn that the Obama administration is promoting abortfacients as a first step to full-blown taxpayer funding of medical and surgical abortion-on-demand – a campaign promise of Hillary Clinton’s.
“Make no mistake about it, when the chief population controller of the U.S. government talks about ‘private and public health plans’” providing “'family planning services,’ she is talking about promoting abortion up to the point of childbirth,” Mosher told LifeSiteNews. “To such people, any restrictions on abortion is a ‘barrier’ to ‘family planning services.’”
Dr. Brian Clowes, the director of education and research at Human Life International, told LifeSiteNews, “Not only does Dr. Moskosky not exclude abortion from her argument for increased reproductive services to meet the ‘emergency,’ but she rather blithely recommends long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as implants and IUDs as ‘safe’ methods to which women must be given greater access, without mentioning the several class action lawsuits brought by thousands of women who have reason to doubt the safety of some of these methods.”
IUDs and Norplant do nothing to reduce future abortions, experts say. Women who use LARCs are nearly twice as likely to have multiple abortions than women who use no birth control, according to researchers at Scotland's Aberdeen University.
Yet in 2012, the CDC promoted the use of abortifacients as “an important way” to reduce the number of abortions.
The Obama administration also suggested Medicaid pay for teenage girls to receive LARCs without their parents’ knowledge in an April 2014 CDC report.
