President-elect Obama must consider every solution to resuscitate the economy. In the meantime, people are losing their jobs and with it, their health insurance. For many, with that goes basic preventive health care. For women the most basic prevention is of pregnancy. We spend 27 years of our lives trying to prevent pregnancy--much of that time we rely on employer-based health care for our family planning method.

Family planning is critical to economic stability, especially in unstable times. There are many solutions Obama and Congress can consider to give people this most basic control over their lives in unsound times, many of these solutions are cost neutral.

For example, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) came up with a solution that Obama can set in motion immediately upon taking office. In a recent letter to President-elect Barack Obama, Crowley urged him to restore birth control discounts for college and university health clinics and private clinics. These groups were removed from discount drug programs by President Bush in his 2006 Federal Deficit Reduction Act. (Bush claimed it was "a mistake." The removal of these centers from the discounting program generated no cost savings, but it did conveniently satisfy his anti-contraception base. Not surprisingly it was "a mistake" he was never interested in correcting.)

College-age women have the highest rate of unintended pregnancy and abortion and should be considered the most at risk population and in need of aggressive pregnancy prevention measures. Last year, Obama sponsored a bill (S 2347) to fix the drug pricing problem that would have restored the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to provide the discounts, and Crowley sponsored a companion House bill (HR 4054). A proposal identical to the Crowley and Obama bills was included in the Senate version of the 2009 war supplemental spending bill; however the provision was removed by members in the House concerned that it would trigger a presidential veto. Obama can indicate his support for the measure now and get this problem solved immediately upon taking office, just in time for the Spring semester.

There are other simple cost-neutral steps to ensure women access to family planning. Once the HHS regulations that allow any healthcare worker to deny women birth control are approved, which is expected any day, the Obama administration can immediately set about the process of undoing the regulation and protecting women's access to birth control. Similarly, the wasteful spending (over 1.5 billion dollars to date) on abstinence-until marriage programs must stop immediately and be routed to programs proven to delay sexual initiation, and lower std and teen pregnancy rates.

The money we've been throwing away on abstinence-only programs could also be used to invest in the serially underfunded Title X program. The number of people relying on Title X has swelled due to the faltering economy and job losses. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, "From 1980 to 2007, appropriations for Title X, the only federal program focused solely on family planning services, had declined by 61% when inflation is taken into account." As a result of the lack of funding for family planning for the poor, we witnessed a spike in the number of poor women getting pregnant unintentionally; at considerably higher rates now than in the mid-1990s. Poor women are giving birth to many more unplanned children and having more abortions. In fact, women living in poverty are almost four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally than women of greater means. Clearly, access to birth control is a economic issue with those least able to support a child most at risk of facing an unwanted pregnancy. A critical component to ensuring economic stability is to grant the most at risk among us the ability to control one of the most important economic factors in our lives: the ability to plan the family we want and support the family we have.