Despite opponent’s claims, the vast majority of Planned Parenthood’s work is devoted to the organization’s more central goal—helping people avoid unwanted pregnancy altogether. PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIER DOULIERY / GETTY

One doesn’t have to be Mike Huckabee, the galactically insensitive former governor of Arkansas—who has compared the consequences of Roe v. Wade with the Holocaust—to believe that the United States would benefit from fewer abortions. Even Hillary Clinton, whose political views could not differ more sharply from Huckabee’s, has said that “abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare.”

People on both sides of the ideological divide—along with the millions in the middle—seem to agree. But how can we reduce the number and the rate of abortions? Roughly half of the more than six million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended. And many of them are to young mothers: according to the Guttmacher Institute, the rate of unintended pregnancies among sexually active teens is double that of all women.

If only we could find an organization that educates young girls, and boys, about the dangers of early and unwanted pregnancies; a group that distributes contraceptives but also stresses the fact that sexual abstinence is safe, free, and, when used continuously, always prevents pregnancy.

That group could really lower the abortion and teen-age pregnancy rates in this country. Oh. Wait. We have that organization. It’s called Planned Parenthood. Yes, Planned Parenthood offers abortions—which are legal in the United States. Nonetheless, according to Planned Parenthood, just three per cent of its services involve abortions. The vast majority of those services are devoted to the organization’s more central goal—helping people avoid unwanted pregnancy altogether.

And who doesn’t support that? Few federally funded organizations can realistically claim to have had more success. There is an almost unending stream of data showing that the numbers of abortions and pregnant teen-agers in the U.S. are at their lowest levels in forty years. The drop has been sharp. In 1991, sixty-two out of every thousand females between the ages of fifteen and nineteen gave birth to a child. In 2013, the figure was twenty-seven. The birth rate has fallen in every geographic region. It has fallen among whites, blacks, and Hispanics. It’s fallen in big cities and rural outposts. It has fallen on college campuses and in the workplace. Fewer pregnant teens also means fewer abortions.

Could it be that education works? The U.S still has the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the developed world. But it is hard to understand how more restrictive abortion laws would reduce the need for abortions. Clearly, however, better access to birth control and sex education has made significant impacts on unwanted pregnancies. The rate of abortions among adolescents in the U.S. is the lowest it has been since abortions became legal, in 1973. The numbers have fallen by two-thirds since 1988.

Forget for a moment about the moral value of improving the lives of millions of teen-agers (and the lives of their families). Just follow the money. You have to earn money to pay taxes, and teen-age pregnancies cost this country well over ten billion dollars a year in lost tax revenues and increased spending on many forms of public assistance.

Stripping the funding from Planned Parenthood, as Jeb Bush and other Republicans have proposed, would add to the burden. You don’t have to be particularly insightful to see where that will lead: more abortions. The organization receives about forty per cent of its funding from the government, though none of that money is used to fund abortions.

As it happens, the Bush family has a track record when it comes to depriving people of contraceptives and even of the opportunity to learn about them. George W. Bush’s Administration was devoted to the idea that abstinence was the only solution to pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and, of course, abortion. Once, he sent federal officials to lecture experienced scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, on the value of refraining from sex. Truly. In fact, almost every political group involved in the issue supports abstinence. But relying on it as the primary method of birth control is another thing entirely, because those programs often fail.

Several years ago, researchers at Yale and Columbia set out to study the impact of virginity-pledge programs. They found that many participants did delay having sex, but that, when it came to preventing sexually-transmitted diseases or pregnancy, students in the programs fared no better than those in the control group. The study also found that students who promised to remain virgins were less likely to use contraception when they did have sex, and they were less likely to seek S.T.D. testing.

This is not only madness but expensive madness. Republicans should welcome the savings guaranteed by cost-effective sex education. The alternative is simply more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.