Texas Republican hypocrites undeterred by reality.
Texas has seen an “unusual,” dramatic increase in the number of women who died from pregnancy-related causes in the past five years, according to a new study.
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In 2012, 148 women in Texas died from pregnancy-related complications, including excessive bleeding, obesity-related heart problems and infection. Two years before, 72 women died from those causes.
The study examined maternal mortality rates across the country, and researchers said they could not explain the specific, sudden growth in the number of deaths in Texas.
The study mentioned “changes to the provision of women’s health services” — a reference to cuts made by state lawmakers in 2011 that stripped funding from Planned Parenthood and other women’s health and family planning services — but the researchers stopped short of saying whether that policy change had any effect on the numbers.
And just what kind of cuts have the state lawmakers made that may have caused the jump in women's deaths?
For the past five years, the Texas Legislature has done everything in its power to defund Planned Parenthood. But it's not so easy to target that organization without hurting family planning clinics around the state generally.
The Effects Of Closing Clinics
By 2014, 82 family planning clinics across the state had closed. The consequence was calamitous. In Midland, for example, when the Planned Parenthood clinic closed, there were two aftereffects: 8,000 well-women appointments a year vanished, and so did the last place a woman could get an abortion between Fort Worth and El Paso.
The University of Texas' Texas Policy Evaluation Project has been investigating the statewide effects of the Legislature's family planning cuts.
"Teens obviously, when they lose access, they don't have a lot of financial resources to go elsewhere for care so they may go without," says Kari White, one of the lead researchers. "Women who are not legal residents are in disadvantaged positions in multiple ways, and even women who are making just a little bit over the cutoff for the women's health program, $50 is still a lot of money out of your budget."
The researchers found that two years after the cuts, Texas' women's health program managed to serve fewer than half the number of women it had before. The Legislature's own researchers predicted that more than 20,000 resulting unplanned births would cost taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars in federal and state Medicaid support. White says that as the state has worked to rebuild its shattered network, the new providers don't necessarily have the same capacity to do cancer screenings and IUD insertions and birth control implants.
Meanwhile, Texas Lawmakers Won’t Let Supreme Court Ruling Stop Them From Restricting Abortion
With a few months to lick their wounds following a June blow in the Supreme Court, which struck down a law that forced dozens of Texas clinics to close, anti-abortion advocates in the state are reigniting their fight to tear down women’s reproductive rights.
After watching their opponents win over the Supreme Court justices with hard facts on just how damaging years of abortion clinic closures in Texas have been for the state’s women, anti-abortion groups are attempting to do the same. They want data to back up their argument that abortion should be further restricted.
The data they are looking for — records of botched abortions, deaths linked to abortion procedures, statistics on patients’ ages, the gestational age of aborted fetuses, and other details — may be hard to find, if not illegal under privacy laws.
Why? Because there aren’t any numbers supporting the idea that abortion is dangerous in the first place.
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In reality, pregnancy has been shown to be far more risky than abortion in Texas. A study to be published in the September issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that the number of pregnancy-related deaths skyrocketed in the state between 2010 and 2012.
That coincided with the Texas legislature’s 2011 decision to cut family planning funding by two-thirds, forcing 60 women’s health clinics to close. The state replaced those clinics with “crisis pregnancy centers,” non-medical, religious based counseling centers.
“It’s a tragedy and it really is an embarrassment,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin whose work informed the SCOTUS ruling, in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. “It really seems like that’s where the state officials should be focusing on trying to improve health and safety.”
But instead, GOP legislators are taking cues from anti-abortion organizations trying to scramble to keep reproductive health clinics closed.
“Lawmakers were put out by the Supreme Court, they were skunked,” Nash said. “And now are in a mood to try and make some moves.”
Texas lawmakers have already introduced new rules and measures to reestablish their state’s ranking as one of least women-friendly states in the nation.
Texas republicans policies are killing women while they claim to be concerned with women's health. The definition of Orwellian.
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