The Arizona Family Health Partnership is once again the sole Title X Family Planning grantee for Arizona. They received their Notice of Award last week for up to 3 years. The grant is for the $5.2M per year.
Title X is a super important public health program that provides folks with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services. It’s designed to prioritize the needs of low-income families or uninsured people. Its overall purpose is to promote positive birth outcomes and healthy families by allowing individuals to decide the number and spacing of children.
The services provided by Title X grantees include family planning and contraception, education and counseling, breast and pelvic exams, breast and cervical cancer screening, screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and HIV. It also focuses on counseling, referrals to other health care resources, pregnancy diagnosis, and pregnancy counseling. Title X funding does not pay for abortions.
The AFHP has been the awardee for these services in AZ for many years. When I was at the ADHS, we didn’t apply for the Title X grant because our team believed that the AFHP did a really good job providing these services. A couple of years ago one of the state budget bills required the ADHS to apply for the Title X grant.
Many people believe the line item was included in the budget in hopes that ADHS rather than AFHP would get the grant. The motivation for that is that the ADHS is prohibited from contracting with Planned Parenthood for Title X services (which do not include abortion services), while AFHP (as an independent nonprofit) could continue to contract with Planned Parenthood.