Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Texas’ Gov. Rick Perry has thrown his support behind a potential 20-week abortion ban in the state, but his office told RH Reality Check that he’ll leave it up to legislators to determine the appropriate punishment for women who get later-term abortions.

How much does Rick Perry hate women? He'll let the legislature decide.

After Perry’s appearance at a Houston crisis pregnancy center last week, RH Reality Check asked his office whether he supported any exceptions to the yet-to-be-proposed law, such as for cases of rape, incest, or the life of the pregnant person. His office’s answer: “those details will be worked out by the Legislature.”

We also wondered: what does Gov. Perry imagine the punishment should be for women who seek abortions after 20 weeks, were Texas to ban such procedures?

His office responded not with the usual anti-choice dithering about punishing doctors instead of abortion-seekers, but with a clear admission that punishment for these women is in order: “That will also be decided by the Legislature.”

What, indeed, might be the appropriate punishment for the southeast Texas single mother of seven children who sought an abortion at 21 weeks? Or the San Antonio woman, 20 weeks pregnant, who’s trying to leave an abusive relationship? Or the college junior from Oklahoma who is picking up extra shifts in hopes of paying for her abortion at 21 weeks?

These are the stories from real people who have contacted the Lilith Fund, a Texas-based non-profit that helps women find funding for safe, legal abortion care. If Texas passes a 20-week abortion ban, Texans like these women — women who are likely to have experienced “multiple disruptive events” in the past year, and who are likely to be victims of domestic violence, according to research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute — would be criminals in the eyes of the state.

Lilith Fund president Amelia Long told RH Reality Check that a 20-week abortion ban “unfairly burdens people that are already experiencing some of the worst problems in their lives.”

Long says it’s not the case that women know they want or need an abortion and are “just putting it off and just being lazy about it,” as Perry and his anti-choice supporters seem to believe. “That is never the case with anyone we talk to.”

Instead, says Long, the Lilith Fund hears from women who are in abusive relationships, or from women who initially had a wanted pregnancy but “then something happens that’s a disaster for them,” making the prospect of pregnancy and parenthood untenable. Long characterized Perry’s position as “not acting with compassion.”

Indeed, how compassionate is it to suggest that an unemployed mother of two, a student looking for waitressing jobs who found herself pregnant at 20 weeks after an unsuccessful medical abortion, should pay a fine or serve jail time?

But that’s Rick Perry’s perspective: women who seek abortions after 20 weeks owe a debt to society that must be paid, somehow. It’ll be up to the Texas legislature to decide just how much these mothers, college students, high schoolers and victims of domestic violence owe.

Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Image by DonkeyHotey released under a Creative Commons license.

Written by Andrea Grimes and Jessica Mason Pieklo for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Women and their allies gather at the Texas State Capitol, April 2012. (Photo: Grimes / Flickr)

Planned Parenthood has filed a new suit in Texas state court claiming that it cannot, under state law, be excluded from participating in the newly-established Texas Women’s Health Program (WHP)—a program which the state created with the express purpose of being able to exclude Planned Parenthood, because Texas considers the health care organization an “abortion affiliate.”

A state judge in Austin issued a temporary restraining order Friday preventing the state from banning Planned Parenthood from the state-run women’s health program. The order was issued a day after a federal appellate court refused to reconsider an earlier 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that allowed the state to implement the ban; Planned Parenthood argued the funding ban should be blocked because it was in violation of federal law.

In the lawsuit filed in Travis County District Court, Planned Parenthood argues that the state’s Affiliate Ban Rule is not authorized by Chapter 32 of the Texas Human Resources Code. That is the state law which establishes the Women’s Health Program.

According to the statute, the program is subject to approval from the federal government and makes any provision “inoperative” if it causes the state to lose federal matching money for the Women’s Health Program. According to the lawsuit, HHSC was not authorized by the Texas legislature to adopt the Affiliate Ban Rule because it makes the Women’s Health Program ineligible for federal funding. The Affiliate Ban Rule is, therefore, invalid as a matter of state law.

In Texas, the Planned Parenthood clinics providing preventive health care to about 50,000 WHP clients or nearly half of the total enrollees in the program are kept completely separate—both financially and physically—from clinics that provide safe abortion care. In fact, pregnant women cannot even participate in the WHP, as the program itself is specifically for the prevention of pregnancy in the first place. Abortion has about as much to do with WHP services as heart surgery might; participants in the program are seen for a very limited selection of reproductive health services, including pap smears and contraception. No WHP patient should ever need an abortion because, if the program works properly as it has done for years, no WHP patient should experience an unplanned pregnancy. 

However, Texas Governor Rick Perry released a statement yesterday in response to the new lawsuit vowing to “keep fighting for life:”

Read the rest of this entry →

Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Texas Governor Rick Perry (Photo: Ed Schipul / Flickr)

On Monday, Texas Governor Rick Perry publicly rejected two major tenets of the Affordable Care act, saying the state would not participate in the individual state exchanges nor in the federal Medicaid expansion. In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released yesterday, Perry wrote that the “Orwellian-named PPACA” would “make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care.”

Texas, which has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country – about one in four Texans currently have no insurance — could receive over a hundred million dollars from the federal government over the next few years, enabling the state to dramatically expand Medicaid overage to low-income adults who are not currently eligible. But, instead, Perry wrote that he believes the Medicaid expansion would “exacerbate the failure of the current system, and would threaten even Texas with financial ruin.”

Texas is already in serious financial trouble, and Perry’s dedication to rejecting any help, or dipping into state reserves, has put it in ever more dire straits. The state notably grappled with its multi-billion dollar budget shortfall during last year’s legislative session; Perry has repeatedly refused to tap into the state’s “Rainy Day Fund” to address the state’s health and education needs, opting instead to cut public services. Perry also turned down millions in federal Medicaid funding for the Women’s Health Program in order to exclude Planned Parenthood from participating in the program in Texas.

Perry’s claims in the Sebelius letter are woefully misinformed, according to one public health policy expert at Houston’s Rice University. Elena Marks, a Baker Institute Scholar in Health Policy at and former director of health and environmental policy for the City of Houston, says it’s a “shame” that Perry can’t see the good a state-run insurance exchange could do for Texas, because if Texas doesn’t set up its own exchange, the ACA ensures the federal government will do it for the state instead.

Read the rest of this entry →

(photo: talkradionews, flickr)

Written by Rene Resendez for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post. For all our coverage of the cuts to the Texas Women’s Health Program, click here.

In Texas, a state where more than one-quarter of women are uninsured, the Women’s Health Program provides preventive health care, including birth control and lifesaving cancer screenings, to more than 130,000 low-income women each year. The federal government, which covers 90 percent of the cost of this program, has made clear to Texas — and to all 50 states — that a rule excluding a comprehensive women’s health care provider like Planned Parenthood restricts the rights of patients and will not be allowed in the Medicaid program. However, Governor Rick Perry and Texas lawmakers are moving forward to disallow Planned Parenthood from participating in the WHP, today.

On March 8, in the midst of a budget deficit, Gov. Perry said the state would reject the nine- to-one federal matching dollars and instead find money in the state budget to pay for the WHP, although it is not clear where the money will be found. Already in the past few months, budget cuts passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Perry cut the state’s family planning program by more than two-thirds, taking away health care from another 160,000 women a year.

Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of care within the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program. More than 40 percent of the women who received vital health care through the Texas Women’s Health Program rely on a Planned Parenthood health center for their preventive health care.

My name is Rene, and I am graduate student. I am also on the WHP. I’ve been a WHP patient for five years. My mom was diagnosed with cervical cancer when she was my age, while pregnant with my sister — this means I am at a 2-3 times increased risk for cervical cancer than other women. Because of my family history, I need to get a check-up every year.

My sister is a college student and also on the WHP. She needs contraception to keep her ovarian cysts under control. Because of the WHP and Planned Parenthood, we can focus on our studies instead of worrying about paying for contraception and cancer screenings. Read the rest of this entry →

(photo: ee382, photobucket)

Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post. For all our coverage of the cuts to the Texas Women’s Health Program, click here.

On March 14th, 2012, at least 300,000 low-income and uninsured Texas women will have no or greatly-reduced access to basic preventive and reproductive health care due to the loss of federal funding for the Medicaid Women’s Health Program in the state. The program has been under threat for months as lawmakers fight over whether it’s legal to exclude Planned Parenthood from the program.

On Friday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters in Houston that the federal government would not extend its waiver, which provided about 90 percent of the cost of the program. It is against federal law to exclude “qualified providers” from providing Medicaid care, and while the federal government considers Planned Parenthood “qualified,” the state of Texas does not. Since 2005, legislators in Texas have sought specifically to block Planned Parenthood from participating in the Women’s Health Program in Texas, when they voted into place a state law, only just now enforced, that bars “affiliates” of abortion providers from receiving funds. Planned Parenthood uses no taxpayer dollars to provide abortions and keeps its abortion services wholly financially separate from its non-abortion services.

In a statement released Friday, Governor Rick Perry’s office stuck the Obama administration with the blame for not renewing the Women’s Health Program, neglecting to mention that there would be no reason to defund the program had Perry and his conservative allies in Texas not sought to defy federal law in the first place. Perry has said that Texas will continue to fund what would very likely amount to a significantly stripped-down version of the program with state funds–despite the fact that state legislators already devastated the state family planning budget last year.

“We’re questioning the governor saying he’s going to continue the funding with state money,” Planned Parenthood of North Texas representative Kelly Hart told RH Reality Check, “and why the state would want to go forward to spend more money to provide care to fewer women.” Hart says Planned Parenthood expects to be able to provide WHP care until they’re phased out in late April so that “more women can have that last chance to get their annual exam.” Read the rest of this entry →

(photo: ee382, photobucket)

Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Last month, when news spread that Virginia legislators were considering a forced trans-vaginal ultrasound bill, the uproar was loud, clear and immediate: women would never stand for this invasive and unnecessary law. Politicos and pop-culture icons alike spoke out against the Republican-lead legislation. What kind of world are we living in, reasonable people wondered, when “informed consent” is tantamount to state-sanctioned rape?

Here’s what kind of world: the kind wherein a mandatory ultrasound law scads worse than the proposed Virginia bill has already been in place for five months. In Texas.

“Texas has the most extreme law that’s being enforced right now,” says the Center For Reproductive Rights’ Julie Rikelman, the lead attorney on the CRR’s lawsuit filed against the Texas legislation. Despite the sympathetic leanings of a federal district judge who initially ruled on the case, the suit has more or less been stalled by a vehemently anti-choice Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the CRR’s requested injunction against enforcement last month. Now, that means that all aspects of the law–mandated ultrasounds, 24-hour waiting periods, and forced speech–are now in full force in Texas.

Intially the CRR was able to gain an injunction against enforcing the parts of the law they argued in court violated doctors’ First Amendment rights. But twenty-five days ago, they lost that injunction and doctors began being legally required to verbally describe the sonogram image, make heartbeat audio available if possible, and offer women the opportunity to view the image.

And while the mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound requirement has garnered a great deal of interest and outrage, Texas providers tell RHRealityCheck that the “most onerous” part of the law, for both providers and abortion-seeking women, has been the mandatory 24-hour wait period between the required ultrasound and the abortion itself. Read the rest of this entry →

Last Friday afternoon, I watched an episode of Private Practice that had aired the week before and was not all that surprised when one of the story lines focused on abortion. The show, which follows the lives of a group of doctors in Los Angeles, has dealt with the topic a number of times before.  It is clear that the writers and producers don’t just support a woman’s right to choose but are willing to risk alienating some viewers in order to use the show as a platform to promote reproductive rights.  In fact, though I often find the writing predictable and overly melodramatic (the show is one of those guilty TV pleasures), I think the writers have done a great job with the abortion debate.  They have given characters a chance to express both sides of the issue but in the end they always present well-reasoned, and even well-researched, arguments for why the right to “safe, legal abortions, without judgment” is so important. 

Still, I was struck by one scene in this episode which reminded me of the mandatory “counseling” some states are now making women go through before they can exercise their legal right to terminate a pregnancy. 

The episode, “God Bless the Child,” focused on the clashing views of two OB/GYNs, Dr. Addison Montgomery who performs abortions (and has had one) and Dr. Naomi Bennett who is opposed to abortion for religious reasons.  A patient, Patty, comes to Addison with uterine cramping and stomach pains about a month after having had an early abortion. It turns out the procedure was not done correctly and the woman is now 19 weeks pregnant. Addison explains that she can still legally have an abortion but that at this stage of the pregnancy it is a more complicated procedure. Patty decides to do it, but Naomi approaches her in the waiting room and pretty blatantly tries to talk her out of terminating her pregnancy.

… Read more

Written by Andrea Grimes for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Before I met with Texas State Representative Dan Flynn last month during Texas’ pro-choice lobby day, I truly believed that even the most passionate anti-choice conservative couldn’t look me in the face and tell me they didn’t really care whether I got the reproductive health care I needed. Who would seriously tell me their religious beliefs are more important than making sure hundreds of thousands of women just like me—women with high-risk HPV–don’t develop cervical cancer?

But like I said, that was before I sat in front of Rep. Flynn, in his Austin office next to his model airplanes and elect-Dan-Flynn gum, and told him how I’d lost my job and my health insurance and needed regular, affordable pap smears to keep an eye on my pre-cancerous cervical dysplasia. I told him Planned Parenthood could provide low-cost paps, breast exams and contraceptives to keep me healthy despite my lack of insurance, and I believed they should continue to be funded by government family planning dollars. He scoffed, waving around a handful of papers—spreadsheets and maps, it looked like—and told me that Planned Parenthood was nothing but a tax-evading abortion machine (he knew because he used to be a bank examiner and had heard some things from some people) and there were so many other options besides Planned Parenthood in Texas. I should and could go to one of those, he told me, so we could spread some of the wealth around to these smaller providers. It would be very easy, he said.

I asked him if he could give me that list he had in his hand, the long list of places I could get low-cost reproductive health care without insurance near my home in Dallas. He glanced at the list and rattled off some names, something about Dallas Emergency Services and Dallas County Hospital District. He didn’t exactly wait for me to get out my pen and pad. I filed out of Flynn’s office with the rest of the women I’d teamed up with for lobby day feeling surprised and disappointed. But I still wanted (needed!) to know where those low-cost health centers were that Flynn had referenced, because I knew the Texas Legislature to be hell-bent on cutting the family planning funds that keep Planned Parenthood and clinics like it afloat.

Planned Parenthood or not, I’d still need well-woman exams, birth control pills and suchlike, and I wanted to know where I could get these things if I had to spend weeks or months scraping by on a freelancer’s salary without health insurance. So here’s what I did: I spent my own time, money and energy trying to find a health care clinic that anti-choice conservatives, legislators and organizations would approve of—namely, to find a Federally Qualified Health Center or “look-alike” center that, by virtue of federal grant funding, cannot provide abortion services except in cases of rape, incest or threat to a mother’s life, as dictated by the 36-year-old Hyde Amendment. … Read more

Written by Amanda Marcotte for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

In this era of fetuses being called to testify in court and anti-choicers trying to strip away funding for cancer screening and condoms, it does feel for pro-choicers like we’ve slipped down the rabbit hole, but instead of finding ourselves in a fun Wonderland, we’re instead in the madhouse of Wingnutland.  With that in mind, I have to tip my hat to the pro-choice members of the Texas legislature, who decided to fight absurdity with absurdity last Thursday during the debate over a law that will require  any woman who wants an abortion to get an ultrasound, go home to “think” about it, and only then come back for her abortion.  It’s unclear yet if she’ll be required to sit in her room and write, “I will not be a dirty slut,” 100 times over in her best handwriting and be denied her cartoons for a week.  Perhaps legislators will be holding on to that for the next legislative session.

Furious at the sexist paternalism and anti-choice nuttery behind this bill—but unable to do anything to stop it—pro-choice Texas legislators instead decided to engage in a bit of performance art to draw attention to the hostility towards women and short-sightedness inherent in these ultrasound bills that condescendingly masquerade as caring.  Houston state representative Harold Dutton got the most coverage for repeatedly making the point that “pro-lifers” drop all pretense of caring about life the second it can’t be used to punish sexually active women.  In rapid order, he introduced three amendments that were tabled by the majority, who really didn’t want to address the issue of the wellbeing of actual children when potential children matter so much more to them.  All three amendments addressed what should happen if a woman looks at a sonogram and decides not to have abortion.  The first amendment would have required the state to pay for the child’s college tuition, the second required the state to pay for the child’s health care until age 18, and the third required the state to pay for the child’s health care until age six. 

No one was surprised that the anti-choice coalition was able to successfully block these amendments, but Dutton’s point was amply made: anti-choice sentimentality about children is just a ruse to force childbirth to punish sexually active women, and they don’t care one whit about the care and feeding of actual children once they’re born and have served the woman-punishing purpose.

Dutton had allies in this move to use the amendment process to draw attention to the hypocrisy, sexism, and sadism of those who push anti-choice legislation.  Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio also  neatly proved that anti-choicers don’t care about fetal life one bit, by offering an amendment that would require clinics providing abortion to offer medically accurate advice about contraception, with the aim of preventing future unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions.  The supposed lovers of fetal life shot this amendment down, doing as anti-choicers generally do, and choosing woman-punishing over abortion-prevention. … Read more

Written by Andrea Grimes for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Across the state of Texas, public officials are watching the 82nd Legislature to find out when they’ll be forced to slash their budgets, and by how much, to accommodate a state financial shortfall that may be as much as $27 billion. Or, if we’re lucky, as little as $15 billion. Right now, the deficit is so huge and the books so complicated, nobody really knows what the final number will be.

In Dallas, where I live, the superintendent of schools recently told the Dallas Observer he may have to cut $260 million in funds for the education of area schoolchildren. He’s just got to wait and see what happens in the “lege.”

Meanwhile, down in Austin, the “lege” is dealing with an emergency. But it’s not a budget emergency. It’s not even a financial emergency at all. According to Governor Rick Perry, it’s an emergency that women in Texas are not asked to listen to a fetal heartbeat and have an abortion provider conduct a sonogram that they’ll describe to women in detail two hours before any abortion procedure.

Speaking before an anti-choice rally group at the Texas capitol on the 38th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, Perry told protestors:

“We can’t afford to give up the good fight until the day Roe v. Wade is nothing but a shameful footnote in our nation’s history books.”

Anti-choice legislators, led by influential Republican senator Dan Patrick whose Harris County District 7 is one of the wealthiest in the state, have jumped at this chance to push a bevy of abortion-related legislation in Texas this session, with multiple bills calling for pre-procedure sonograms, more calling to eliminate public funding for abortion and also demands to eliminate all public funding to anyone affiliated with abortion providers themselves. Other bills support Texans’ right to buy controversial “Choose Life” license plates, like these available in New Jersey.

But it’s the emergency thing that gets pro-choice activists here. Gov. Perry’s “emergency” designation permits the bills to be heard in the first 60 days of the session—they can’t be heard so early without it. How can medically unnecessary sonograms be an emergency in the face of a multi-billion budget shortfall and economic crisis?

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