GOP No Longer Cares About The Deficit If It Means Women Having More Babies

WASHINGTON — Many Republicans hailed the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as a victory for one of their highest-profile priorities: ending abortion. But it comes with a string attached — more federal spending, which Republicans usually hate.

More than 4 in 10 births in the United States — 42% in 2019 — are paid for by Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor whose costs are split between the federal government and individual states. At an average of $18,865 per birth and with one estimate that there will be more than 150,000 extra births annually because of Dobbs, there will almost certainly be more spending.

House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said he’d like to see Congress’ fiscal umpire, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, put pen to paper on the impact of Dobbs.

“I would welcome a CBO score as another way to qualify the damage the Dobbs decision will do to women across the country,” the Kentucky Democrat told HuffPost.

To be clear, there are far more pressing concerns about forcing people to have babies. And even just looking at cost, Medicaid doesn’t cover all the many, many costs that come with having a baby who will become a toddler and then a child and then a teenager, and so forth.

But for a party that has been so quick to raise the alarm on federal spending over programs like expanding the child tax credit, Republicans are noticeably quiet about the financial cost that outlawing abortion will have.

Exactly how much more Medicaid spending Dobbs will entail is unclear. In the past, the CBO has estimated that bills restricting access to abortion would increase births and boost Medicaid spending.

Those increases, though, have been relatively small compared to the program’s overall outlays. A House Republican bill in 2015 to defund Planned Parenthood would have increased Medicaid spending by $650 million over 10 years. A 2017 bill GOP bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks would have increased Medicaid spending by $175 million over 10 years, but the boost in spending could have been as much as $335 million if more people than projected carried their pregnancies to term instead of ending them before 20 weeks.

Dobbs’ impact may be several orders of magnitude higher. Taking the Kaiser estimate of $18,865 in birth costs,…