Collateral Damage in the War on Women

[redqueen]

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/10/collateral_damage_in_the_war_on_women.html

...

Two years into what NARAL Pro-Choice America has famously dubbed the War on Women, the wear is beginning to show in cities and towns around the country where poor, uninsured women live. In the right’s new abortion war strategy, taking apart the infrastructure for family planning services—providers like Planned Parenthood, Title X funding and, now, the Affordable Care Act—is as important as triggering a Supreme Court challenge that will overturn Roe v. Wade. In just one year, dozens of clinics throughout Texas have shut down or slashed their hours—limiting options for poor and working women in even big cities like Austin and Dallas, and closing the doors of clinics that have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. The state offers a striking example of the collateral damage that’s inevitable when anti-choice Republicans use the legislative equivalent of drone strikes to attack abortion rights.

To show me what rural poverty looks like in Hidalgo County, Planned Parenthood promotora (outreach worker) Dora Alicia Proa takes me to a colonia nearly 15 miles away from McAllen, in San Carlos. Colonias are unincorporated subdivisions founded in the 1950s by predatory developers who sold lots of barren and flood-prone land to poor Latin American migrant workers without installing basic infrastructure. They are synonymous with poverty. Literally. The Texas Secretary of State defines these communities as “residential areas along the Texas-Mexico border that may lack some of the most basic living necessities, such as potable water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing.”

Last year, Hidalgo County’s Planned Parenthood offered free birth control, STI testing, Well Woman exams and men’s health screenings at the San Carlos Community Resource Center. Now, to get the same services, patients have to drive up to 20 miles to the Edinburg clinic, where a physical, HIV test and Pap smear costs at least $60 and a monthly supply of birth control pills costs $20 at minimum.

The Hidalgo County Health and Human Services Department runs eight clinics where people of all ages can get a range of services, from tuberculosis treatment to newborn screenings. However, wait times are reportedly brutal, and the health department’s STI testing site is located in McAllen. Ostensibly to fill the void created by Planned Parenthood closures, the University of Texas Medical Branch opened a maternal health clinic in Hidalgo. But that site is also in McAllen; it specializes in pregnancy and prenatal care, and it doesn’t have weekend hours.

...

A good look at what the right wing wants for America's women.

[ananda]

1. K&R

This makes me ashamed for Texas.. so ashamed.

[redqueen]

2. This state seems stuck.

Gerrymandering and a lack of interest on the part of the national party to fight here has us in a cycle of one step forward, two steps back. It used to be a blue state. Then the Reagan Dems happened. Mixing politics and religion was the shrewdest thing Reagan ever did.

[TheKentuckian]

3. I don't think it was shrewd at all, I'd say it is rulership 101

but if you don't get that they probably make you do remedial work until you catch up.

Reagan was shrewd for exploiting the narrow pass that allows one to full force attack governance while leaving rulership virtually untouched and strengthened in many areas.

Damn clever in an evil sort of way to demonize government responsibility while increasing government authority, scope, and raw power. Religion to the point of theocracy was the proper marketing tool to allow such a dichotomy but it is old as rulers in this world. The exception is tiny compared to the rule. Reagan just followed the rule.

[redqueen]

4. I can't think of any other examples among so-called 'first world' countries

in modern times.

I attributed the successful implementation of what should really only be expected to work in countries with a less well educated citizenry to his (or his handlers', really) shrewd marketing sense.

It's shameful when you get right down to it.

[TheKentuckian]

5. I understand but you are only looking at the exception of human experience rather

than thousands of years of rule. Modern, first world indicates a hand full of decades in a few countries.


There has been no evolutionary leap, people are pretty much the same as a short five or ten thousand years ago and you are essentially talking about a minority of humans over a very brief period of time, less than a human life span.