(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

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.

Perry claims that this reduction in access to abortion will “empower families and protect our children’s future.”

What it does, instead, is ensure that people have less control over the size of their families because the state government works to diminish access to both the means of preventing unintended pregnancies, and to the one safe, legal and common medical procedure available to women facing them. The result? A state where more and more people rely on public assistance every year. Texas has America’s highest number of citizens on food stamps, sees somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of its population living in poverty, and taxpayers here help fund 223,128 Medicaid-funded births per year (the second highest in the nation).

Read it all From Andrea Grimes here.