The League of Women Voters was founded to help newly enfranchised women exercise their hard-won right to vote. Over more than a century, that mission has grown far beyond the ballot box. Today the League’s two premier causes include protecting everyone’s right to vote and defending women’s right to full, affordable health care. It’s that second commitment that compels us to sound the alarm now.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon recognized that unwanted pregnancies were a driver of poverty – and signed Title X into law to address it. Title X became the first federal program entirely dedicated to family planning and reproductive health care. For 50 years, it has been one of America’s quietest success stories, transforming American life.
The numbers are profound. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in just 20 of its 50 years, Title X prevented 20 million unintended pregnancies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the teen birth rate – once nearly one in 10 girls – now sits closer to one in a hundred.
Title X didn’t just help women plan their families; it lifted families out of poverty, stabilized homes, and reduced abortions by the millions. The Guttmacher Institute reports that for every dollar invested, the government saves seven dollars in Medicaid expenses. Nixon understood this math in 1970, the current administration is moving in the opposite direction.
The administration’s 2026 budget request proposes eliminating the Title X program completely – quietly enough that most Americans haven’t noticed. This month, the Department of Health and Human Services released new Title X funding guidelines that represent a stunning reversal of the program’s mission. The word “contraception” appears exactly once in the entire document – flagged as a concern under “over-medicalization.” IUDs and birth control pills, two of the most effective contraceptive tools available, go entirely unmentioned as priorities.
What fills the void? Fertility awareness methods – essentially period tracking and temperature monitoring, which fail between 12% and 24% of the time in typical use, says the Cleveland Clinic. An IUD fails less than 1% of the time. The administration is steering federal family planning dollars away from what works and toward what doesn’t. The new guidance mentions family formation promotion (marriage?) and “lifestyle changes” as substitutes for clinical care. This is not health policy. It’s ideology dressed in wellness language.
The funding freezes began in March 2025. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, funding has been withheld from 879 clinics – including public health departments and Federally Qualified Health Centers – across 23 states, potentially cutting off care for up to 834,000 people. This isn’t bureaucratic reshuffling. It’s a policy designed to ensure that fewer low-income women can reliably prevent pregnancy.
Behind every funding cut is a woman without options – and a taxpayer who will foot the bill. Women who can plan their pregnancies are healthier, earn more, are less likely to require public assistance and raise children who thrive – those who have better cognitive development, lower rates of behavioral problems and greater educational achievement.
Contraception is not merely a matter of personal freedom, it is a matter of public health, economic stability and basic human dignity. For many women, it treats conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Removing it from the equation doesn’t make their lives more natural. It makes them harder.
Here is the bitterest irony: The Guttmacher research estimates Title X to have prevented more than 9 million abortions. By defunding it, the anti-abortion movement will likely cause more unintended pregnancies – and therefore more abortions. The very outcome they claim to oppose.
What’s happening to Title X won’t make headlines the way a Supreme Court ruling does. It will happen through funding guidelines, rule rescissions and quiet regulatory changes – easy to miss until the clinics close and patients have nowhere to go. The broader impact falls on all of us: lost productivity, increased emergency room usage and unintended pregnancies that directly drive up state and federal Medicaid costs.
Stop this quiet war on women’s health. Make your voices heard.
Jan Phillips is a League of Women Voters La Plata, board member, and health care chair. She lives in Durango.
