From RH Reality Check: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/01/23/where-choice-is-not-enough-who-has-access-to-family-planning-in-texas
by Andrea Grimes
January 23, 2013
Tuesday was the much-celebrated 40th anniversary of the seminal Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in America. But today, Texans are waiting 24 hours for mandatory, forced trans-vaginal sonograms. Today, Texans are being turned away from clinics they’ve relied on for years for contraceptive care. Today, Texans are crossing the border into Mexico in hopes of ending unintended pregnancies. Today, Texans are choosing between the possibility of losing their jobs and the possibility of raising a family they can’t support.
Today in Texas, it is yesterday.
Texas is the future of the past; it is a place where regressive politics and backwards thinking have resulted not in strong families and healthy kids but in 6.3 million uninsured people—the highest percentage of any state—and a consistently rising poverty rate.
Our governor, Rick Perry, makes no bones about the fact that he’d like to make abortion a thing of the past, not by increasing access to contraceptives and thereby reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, but by increasing funding to religious, ideologically- driven crisis pregnancy centers, forcing women to get mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds and listen to or read about medically-unfounded claims linking abortion to breast cancer and infertility.
“In Texas, we’ve worked hard to strengthen our abortion laws to the greatest extent possible under Roe v. Wade,” the governor said in a statement released on Tuesday. This is precisely the tactic, and an effective one, that conservative lawmakers and their religious-right backers have taken in Texas: if abortion can’t be made illegal, it can at least be made so difficult to get that only a very few people have access to it.
Continue reading at: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/01/23/where-choice-is-not-enough-who-has-access-to-family-planning-in-texas
