GOP Plays Politics With Women's Health

These two excellent charts clearly show how devastating the actions of the Republican-controlled legislature have been to women's health in the state of Texas. In the 2011 legislature, the legislature cut more than $200 million dollars from family planning clinics in the state (completely ignoring the fact that many of these clinics also provided other health care for poor women in Texas). They used abortion as an excuse to do this -- claiming their action would prevent many abortions in the state.

However, that was just political posturing -- a play to the hard-hearted agenda of their teabagger base. The truth is that those cuts did nothing to stop abortion, because the clinics that had been receiving state funds were already banned from using state funds (or federal funds) to perform abortions.

What the cuts actually did was cause the closing of at least 53 women's health clinics -- none of which were abortion providers. They were however, providers of health care and family planning to poor women across the state. Since they have now closed (due to a lack of funding), close to 200,000 women can no longer receive care in them -- since the number of women receiving care in these types of clinics has dropped from near 350,000 to slightly more than 150,000.

There is another statistic that shows just how insane this hard-hearted cut was for the state. It turns out that since so many women no longer have access to family planning, it is expected that there will be an extra 24,000 births in 2013 and 2014 -- births that the state of Texas will have to pick up the tab for (since these women have no health insurance), and that bill will be about double the amount of the original cuts. In other words, the GOP legislators not only did not prevent any abortions, they also cost the state a lot of unnecessary spending.