Remember when Texas governor Rick Perry and the GOP state government led an unprecedented assault on women’s reproductive health in the name of preventing abortions, using dirty tricks to pass an unconstitutional law that led to a boom in unsafe home abortions and a black market for day-after pills, while ending Planned Parenthood’s vital cancer-screening program, before defunding Planned Parenthood altogether?
Over the past four years, maternal mortality in Texas has doubled, an incredible increase in maternal mortality in a developed country that cannot be explained by war or sustained natural disasters.
And that’s before the Zika stats start coming in.
In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.
At the same time, Texas eliminated all Planned Parenthood clinics – whether or not they provided abortion services – from the state program that provides poor women with preventive healthcare. Previously, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas offered cancer screenings and contraception to more than 130,000 women.
Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds
[Molly Redden/The Guardian]
(Image: Planned Parenthood Rally Austin, TX 3/13/12, scATX, CC-BY-ND)