With an election just weeks away, we encourage everyone to learn more about the issues facing individual states.  Governors and state legislatures control billions of dollars in state budgets and make crucial decisions about reproductive health care and other critically important matters on the state level.

In New Mexico, we are fortunate to have an infrastructure in place that protects and respects women.  The state has allocated funds that ensure women from all income groups have access to affordable contraception.  The governor and legislators will soon be making budgetary decisions that will have a lasting impact on this kind of program.

New Mexico and many other state legislatures around the country will likely be considering bans and restrictions on abortion similar to those recently passed in Nebraska and Oklahoma.  These laws place onerous limitations on access to safe and legal abortion, making true accessibility even more challenging.

Women in New Mexico are grateful they can get high-quality reproductive health care without the burdensome restrictions found in many other parts of the country, but we can’t afford to be complacent.  Fourteen other states impose  ‘waiting periods’ on women seeking abortion, five require doctors to give outright false information about the link between breast cancer and abortion to their patients though there is no causal relationship, and seven require physicians to tell patients seeking abortion that only negative psychological effects can be expected as a result of abortion.  None of these barriers to care currently exist in New Mexico.

In addition, our governor and legislature will be deciding on funding strategies to combat teen pregnancy in our state.  New Mexico is #1 in teen pregnancy and #2 in teen births in the United States.  Comprehensive sex education has been proven to reduce the teen pregnancy rate.

Roughly 98 percent of teen moms do not graduate college by their 30^th birthdays, thereby lowering their lifetime earning capacity.  In turn, this reduces tax receipts to the state.  Children of teen moms are more likely to become teen parents, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and depressed state revenue that has put our economy in peril.

In fact, according to our Department of Health, teen pregnancy costs New Mexico taxpayers at least $320 million per year.  Most of those costs are associated with negative consequences for the children of teen moms, such as public health care, welfare benefits and lost tax revenue. 

Approximately 139,000 New Mexican women need publicly funded contraception.  For every $1 spent on family planning, the state saves roughly $4 in unintended pregnancy costs. 

As you can see, family planning issues are integrally tied to fiscal discipline.

There are critical issues facing every state – from job creation and managing tight budgets to establishing sound immigration policies.  Your governor sets the policies, makes the decisions and commits the resources to address these issues.  Your legislature passes the bills that determine funding priorities and sends those bills to the governor for approval. The upcoming election will have a major impact on state policy.

We urge everyone to take the time to understand these important issues before voting.