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State “At Risk”

Texas

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the threat to women’s health. This past legislative session, Rick Perry and his friends in the legislature drastically cut access to reproductive health services that will leave Texas women without access to vital health care.

Why We’re Watching Texas

In the 2012–13 budget, the Texas Legislature decimated family planning funding, slashing it from $111 million to only $38 million. The Legislative Budget Board estimates that because of these funding cuts, nearly 300,000 women will lose family planning services while the state will face an additional 20,000 unintended pregnancies at a taxpayer cost of more than $231 million. Politicians callously took away lifesaving cancer screenings for cervical and breast cancer, access to birth control, and other basic preventive health care for women.

In addition to drastic cuts to family planning programs, Governor Perry and the state legislature also passed an intrusive mandatory ultrasound bill. This measure would have forced women seeking abortion care to view an ultrasound and forced physicians to deliver a politically motivated speech to women, even if the women decline. Fortunately, a U.S. district court judge struck down some of the worst parts of the law, but many provisions remain, including the requirement that Texas women make two separate trips to a health center to receive a safe, legal abortion.
 

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How We Got Here

The 2010 elections swept in a wave of anti-women’s health legislators. Governor Perry, along with this new, overwhelmingly extreme legislature, has worked tirelessly to undermine women’s health.
 

Key Article:

Planned Parenthood Struggles After State Budget Cuts
Thanh Tan, The Texas Tribune 10/15/2011


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Texas by the Numbers

Nearly 300,000

Women will lose family planning services such as essential breast and cancer screenings, treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and affordable, reliable birth control as a result of the cuts to the family planning budget.
 

10

A teen gets pregnant somewhere in Texas every 10 minutes according to the University of Texas Prevention Research Center in Houston.

2nd and 3rd

The state has the second-highest rate of repeat teen pregnancy in the nation, and the third-highest teen birthrate. Despite these glaring statistics, Governor Rick Perry has asserted “abstinence works” in Texas to prevent teen pregnancy — but it’s clear he doesn’t have the evidence.

8.3 million

Despite the $73 million cuts to cost-saving, proven family planning programs, not to mention the $4 billion hole the legislature left in public education funding, conservative leaders still found $8.3 million to fund unregulated, unlicensed crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis pregnancy centers do not offer any medical services and cannot replace the lifesaving care that the cuts to family planning took away from hundreds of thousands of low-income Texas women.