Looks Like Meat Family Planning is Back on the Menu, Girls!

As you'll no doubt recall, funding for family planning was one of the first items jettisoned from the stimulus bill as a sop to the great and powerful sky-god Bipartisanship. Well, now it's back—in the proposed 2010 federal budget:

To congressional Republicans, one of the most objectionable parts of an early version of the House's economic recovery package was funding for family planning services. Conservatives cried that spending "hundreds of millions on contraceptives" wouldn't stimulate the economy. (Even though it would.) President Obama agreed to drop the provision from the recovery package. However, he has reinserted it into his FY 2010 budget. On p. 127, there is a provision to "[e]xpand availability of family planning services under Medicaid," which is estimated to save the government $190 million over 10 years. Here are statements from Planned Parenthood and NFPRHA.

I'm cautiously optimistic. Call it the Hesitancy of Hope, in which I hope that it's not being inserted merely as a bargaining chip to be traded away in another public trimming of "chaff."

ETA: 1,000 points to the first person who gets the title reference.