A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all the obvious reasons.
But is Planned Parenthood actually a net drain on the public fisc? In Thursday’s Times, Gail Collins persuasively argues just the opposite. In doing so she hearkens back to old-time, pre-war Progressivism, and to one of the central principles upon which Planned Parenthood itself was founded: that because the poorest and least educated (and least educable) people tend to have the most children, and because a persistent underclass is expensive to maintain in a thousand different ways, then the lower their birthrate, the better the public balance-sheet. Therefore, in Ms. Collins’ words, “destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser”.
Ms. Collins didn’t put it all quite this way, but that’s the idea — and it’s how Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger (along with most other Progressives of the era) saw it, too. In Sanger’s 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, she wrote: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the issue of birth control.”
I don’t always agree with Gail Collins, but she may be right about this one. Fiscal conservatives, take note.