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What Texas Tells Us About the Latest Threats to Women’s Health Care
Planned Parenthood operates more than six hundred clinics across the country, and
a majority of its patients have incomes that fall near or below the federal poverty level;
the organization receives around forty per cent of its revenue from federal funding, mostly through Medicaid.
Cutting off those payments would be a drastic change for women’s health care in this country.
For a glimpse of just how drastic it would be, we can look to Texas, where state legislators have been systematically defunding and handicapping Planned Parenthood for years.
Currently, the Texas legislature is in special session, and three more anti-abortion measures have already been passed.
One of them prevents local and state government agencies from contracting in any way—including via lease agreements—with clinics that are affiliated with abortion providers.
As with the federal provision attached to the repeal of Obamacare, Planned Parenthood is not mentioned by name in this Texas bill.
And yet, as Texas senators acknowledged last Friday, the bill only affects Planned Parenthood.
The campaign against Planned Parenthood in Texas kicked off in 2011, a point when, as Lawrence Wright noted recently in the magazine,
the organization was serving sixty per cent of the health needs of low-income women in the state.
the state government cut family-planning spending by two-thirds and approved a budget that, starting in 2013, banned Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s women’s-health program, now called Healthy Texas Women.
Texas had to give up a nine-to-one federal funding match. Millions of dollars in spending for women’s health care were turned away.
sixteen additional states have already proposed or approved similar bans.
Within months of the family-planning budget getting slashed in Texas, more than sixty women’s-health clinics had closed.
Teen abortions and teen births have both been increasing in Texas since 2011, and
the maternal mortality rate in Texas doubled from 2010 to 2014.
It’s now 35.8 deaths per hundred thousand live births—
the worst maternal mortality rate you can find in the developed world. (TGB: Electing Repugs has consquences: dead women, more unwanted pregnancies, more abortions)
“Twenty or thirty years ago,” she told me over the phone, “we saw mainly women under the age of thirty-five. These days, as Texas women lose access to other options, we’re seeing more women, and a wider range of women—preteens up to women in their fifties and sixties.”
the Austin-area clinics have begun seeing more and more patients from farther away.
We routinely send prescriptions out in a seventy-five-to-one-hundred-mile radius.”
Years ago, I had a Planned Parenthood bumper sticker, and someone slashed my tires,”
Planned Parenthood serves such a large portion of low-income women, and has done so for so long, that other clinics are logistically incapable of picking up the slack.
“There is a real fear, if Texas continues along this line, if they continue to downgrade our funding—where will these women go?”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-texas-tells-us-about-the-latest-threats-to-womens-health-care?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(36)&CNDID=43758549&spMailingID= 11578863&spUserID=MTQzNTk4NzA3ODYzS0&spJobID=12025 53527&spReportId=MTIwMjU1MzUyNwS2
TX Repugs, you Repug voters, and above all, Texas Christian Sharia
) and it'll go
