Texas Women Face More Barriers To Reproductive care
By Vince Leibowitz on Apr 6, 2006 in Texas Public Policy & Taxation
Planned Parenthood’s Choice Magazine has a piece up on abortion in Texas. It notes that, in addition to already existing roadblocks, low-income Texas women will soon find it even more difficult to get access to reproductive healthcare:
The state’s family planning services budget was slashed by a colossal 32 percent from 2005-2006. The money going to providers like Planned Parenthood will be further eviscerated when up to $10 million a year is reallocated to federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). FQHCs provide a range of services, including contraception and family planning counseling, but they do not perform medical procedures of any kind, including abortion.These community clinics do a “wonderful service,” says Rosemarie Herrmann, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Cameron & Willacy Counties (PPCWC), who praises FQHCs as “a vital part of the health care system” for her area’s impoverished residents. But despite their great work, says Herrmann, the shift in funding to FQHCs poses a serious problem for Texas women who turn to other providers like Planned Parenthood for reproductive health care. And many FQHCs simply don’t need the extra money.Some of these FQHCs already have healthy budgets. One FQHC, which received $226,000 in funding, has an $18 million budget; another, which received $250,000, boasts annual revenue of more than $12 million. “For them to get these funds is a drop in the bucket,” says Herrmann. “For [PPCWC] to lose them [means cutting] 25 percent of our family planning funding.”
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FQHC staffers themselves acknowledge the political subtext: far from requesting these allocations, they say, they were approached by anti-choice legislators and asked how much funding they could absorb. “We’ve been community partners with FQHCs for a long time,” says Heather Paffe, political director, Texas Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates (TAPPA). “This is not ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — our beef is with the legislators,” whose decision could cause an estimated 38,000 women to lose access to reproductive health care.
So, where’s the mony that’s been cut going to go? Try this on for size:
There’s more beef to be had: up to an additional $5 million will be diverted from family planning services to “alternatives to abortion,” also known as “pregnancy care centers” or “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs). CPCs market themselves as health care providers, but what they actually dispense is abortion “dissuasion,” often religiously based and medically inaccurate.Whereas comprehensive women’s clinics provide a range of services and are subject to licensing requirements and government oversight, CPCs are unlicensed and unsupervised by the state, and staffed mostly by volunteers rather than medical professionals. CPCs promoting abstinence-only sex education are eligible for further state funds.The Texas Department of State Health Services estimates that an additional 16,668 low-income women may lose access to abortion- and reproductive health-related services over two years after these reallocations.
There is actually one of these CPCs located in Garden Valley, just over the county line in Smith County called “A Mother’s Heart.” There were also, a year or so back, some plans to build a similar facility in Wills Point, but I believe those plans were scrapped because people didn’t want the place in their neighborhood.
This is definately something we need to pay attention to during the ‘07 legislative session.
Um… all of these “services” you’re lamenting “lack of access” to are to prevent reproduction.
Is there any roadblock to prenatal care, labor and delivery services, or anything that actually has to do with reproduction?