The recent Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which put politics before women's health by overturning 30 years of precedent, was tragic in many ways.

Kimberlee Evert is president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania (kevert@ppwp.org).

The ruling, which declared constitutional a national ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, undermines the doctor-patient relationship and a physician's ability to care for patients. It assumes that women cannot make decisions. And it opens up the floodgates for new national and state legislation restricting the right of women -- and their families -- to make personal decisions about childbearing.

While extremist legislators in Western Pennsylvania sharpen their pens gleefully, those of us dedicated to providing real women with real health care have another concern. We worry that in the feeding frenzy of ideologues seeking to undermine women's options -- in the mistaken belief that they know better than women themselves -- the real goal will be lost. After all, the commonsense solution to reducing the number of abortions is clear: Allow women to prevent pregnancy by educating them and providing them access to contraception.

Certainly giving women more control over their lives, rather than less, is a morally sound approach. But it also makes sense for practical reasons, reasons much more important than ideology. We know it works. The Centers for Disease Control states on its Web site that successful "efforts to decrease unintended pregnancy include finding better forms of contraception and increasing contraceptive use and adherence."

In the most recent data available, collected between 1994 and 2001, unplanned pregnancies for wealthier women declined by 20 percent. That's not because wealthier women are staying abstinent, but because they're educating and protecting themselves. For poor women, who often lack access to sexuality education or contraception, unplanned pregnancies increased by almost 30 percent during the same period. It's no coincidence that women living below the poverty level are four times more likely to seek a pregnancy termination than their wealthier counter- parts. Unfortunately, those making the most noise about stopping abortions by criminalizing women also seem dedicated to inhibiting good prevention efforts.

Rep. Darryl Metcalfe, R-Cranberry, spoke out recently about feeling emboldened to create new limitations on the ability of women to make this intensely personal and private decision. For the record, Pennsylvania already has the dubious distinction of having some of most restrictive abortion laws in the country. You'd think, then, that since Mr. Metcalfe hopes to attack abortion rights, he'd also want to reduce the number of abortions by funding contraception. Not so. Mr. Metcalfe routinely attacks the little money the state does spend to ensure that health-care providers like Magee Women's Hospital, the Midwife Center and Planned Parenthood can offer low-cost contraception to women in need.

On the national level, the current administration expends significant energy on attacking the ability of women to seek abortion services. It promotes abstinence-only education for unmarried girls and women and disallows discussion of contraception.

Just three weeks ago, the research institute commissioned by Congress to review these programs, the nonpartisan Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. found that abstinence-only, anti-contraception educational programs have had no impact on teen sexual activity. Zero. Zilch. None. That's $1 billion spent on abstinence-only education during the past decade down the drain.

I can only dream of what Planned Parenthood could have done with $1 billion. One year's worth of oral contraceptives costs about $240. That means we could have provided all the women in Pennsylvania of child-bearing age with contraception free for a year. Plus all the women in West Virginia. And we'd still have money left over.

The $1 billion is gone, but Pennsylvanians can work hard to ensure that more money and time isn't wasted on futile efforts to prevent women from having sex or making their own decisions and instead focuses on helping women take control of their lives. Education. Contraception. It sounds almost too easy, too noncontroversial, to be true.

Reducing unintended pregnancies reduces abortions. Providing education and access to contraception reduces unintended pregnancies. Unlike so many right-wing legislators who use the issue of abortion as a political tool to turn out extremist voters, statistics don't lie. It's time we pay attention to them.