With their usual foresight, GOP Texas lawmakers cut Planned Parenthood funding from the state's women's "health" program in 2013. And lo and behold, an independent study by the New England Journal of Medicine has found that resulted in fewer women using long-acting birth control. Guess what else happened: births among low-income families also rose (though the study didn't make an explicit correlation between lower birth control use and higher birth rates).
Man, who coulda seen that coming? I mean, cutting funding for a provider that delivered services to about 60 percent of the state's low-income women of childbearing age doesn't necessarily mean fewer people can get those services.
A top Texas Republican lawmaker, state Sen. Jane Nelson, called the study misleading and said it didn't take into account all state programs for women. The state health commission said the number of clinics providing women's health services had doubled.
Actually, Ms. Nelson, you're wrong. The research simply measured how many women were accessing those services, not where they were accessing them from. So it did take all that great Texas programming into consideration. You guys just completely and utterly failed low-income women.
Researchers, though, said Texas hasn't filled the void left by Planned Parenthood.
"Whatever good efforts are being made, they weren't enough to offset the impact of suddenly removing Planned Parenthood," said Joseph Potter, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study authors.
Yes, that. The research found that women accessing birth control methods such as contraceptive implants and shots and IUDs fell sharply, by about one-third.
In the three months before funding was cut, there were 1,042 pharmacy and medical claims for IUDs, implants and birth control injections. In the three months after the cuts were implemented, that number fell to 672. That represents a decline of nearly 36%, according to the study.
These trends were not seen in counties that hadn’t had a Planned Parenthood, the study authors wrote.
Short-term methods like birth control pills and contraceptive rings were not significantly impacted.
Let's remember that Ohio's GOP lawmakers are replicating this failed experiment as we speak. Gov. John Kasich has pledged to sign just such a bill because Ohio's different—they're entirely poised to fill the void left by Planned Parenthood cuts.
Asked if he was concerned the cuts would fuel an existing shortage of health providers, he said: “We don’t think that’s a problem, because there are many different entities that can handle this, from our hospitals throughout the state of Ohio to our federal clinics.”
Yeah, that’ll work. Take it from Texas!