Politics & Power Quote by Louise Slaughter

The sentence reads like a budget line item, but it’s really an argument about who gets to have a future. By opening with a stark fraction, Slaughter frames unintended pregnancy not as a morality play but as a structural math problem: millions of women are doing what adults do - having sex, making plans, trying to manage risk - and the market isn’t meeting them where they live. The phrasing “sexually active, but do not want to get pregnant” deliberately refuses euphemism. It normalizes sexual agency while spotlighting the policy failure that turns a private intention into a public consequence.

Her word choice is tactical. “Need publicly funded services” isn’t charity language; it’s entitlement language. “Access public health programs” signals that the programs already exist, and the barrier is administrative, geographic, and political - not personal responsibility. Dropping “Medicaid and Title X” grounds the claim in the real levers of government, not vibes. It’s a legislator’s move: name the statutes, implicate the appropriations process, force the debate onto funding rather than shame.

The context is a long-running U.S. tug-of-war over reproductive health, where contraception access is praised in the abstract and sabotaged in practice through clinic defunding, eligibility hurdles, and ideological battles over Title X. Slaughter’s subtext is blunt: if you want fewer abortions, fewer unplanned births, and lower healthcare costs, you don’t moralize; you pay for prevention. The quote dares opponents to admit they’re not contesting outcomes - they’re contesting women’s autonomy.