This is not to say the health benefits aren’t important. They are, and they have been well documented and cited. For decades Planned Parenthood and other reproductive-health providers have—with support from programs such as Medicaid and Title X, the nation’s only program solely focused on making family planning available to all—prevented or provided care for millions of unintended pregnancies, unintended births, abortions, sexually transmitted infections, and cervical cancer.

If that’s not enough—clearly, it’s not—the economic benefits of these programs are what should earn them high praise from conservatives. In a Guttmacher Institute study of women seeking contraceptive care at publicly funded clinics, 63 percent of women reported birth control had allowed them to take better care of themselves or their families, and 56 percent said it allowed them to take care of themselves financially. Half reported that it helped them stay in school and complete their education and that it helped them get or keep a job and advance their careers. In a recent poll, 72 percent of Pennsylvania voters said a woman's ability to control the timing and size of her family impacts her financial stability, and 62 percent believed that laws that made abortion harder to access can negatively impact a woman's financial security. Polls of voters in New York and Virginia showed similar results.

Access to family planning has increased women’s labor-force participation, improved their—and their family’s—economic security, and has multi-generational health and economic benefits. The National Women’s Law Center highlights research that shows the initial availability of birth-control pills in the early 1970s accounted for 30 percent of the growth in the proportion of women in skilled careers between 1970 and 1990, and contributed to an increase in the number of women in fields that are dominated by men, such as medicine and law. Women’s ability to plan and space their pregnancies has been shown to improve educational attainment and increase wages and lifetime earnings. And the children of mothers who had access to birth control have higher family incomes and college completion rates. Researcher Martha Bailey found that—relative to children conceived in the same areas before family-planning programs began—children born after the advent of federally funded family-planning programs lived in households with higher annual incomes and were 5 percent less likely to live in poverty, 15 percent less likely to live in households receiving public assistance, and 4 percent less likely to have a single parent.

Investing in reproductive health isn’t just good for women and their families—it’s good for the economy. Today it is estimated that every dollar spent on publicly funded family planning yields a savings of $7.09 in public expenditures. In 2013, publicly funded family-planning providers helped women prevent two million unintended pregnancies, one million of which would have resulted in unplanned births and 693,000 in abortions. In 2010 just over half of all births—and 68 percent of the 1.5 million unplanned births—in the United States were paid for by public insurance. That year, the government expenditures on unintended pregnancies and the associated births, abortions, and miscarriages totaled $21.0 billion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, without these services rates of abortion, unintended pregnancies, and unplanned births would have all been 60 percent higher, and the related costs could have been as much as 75 percent higher.