Texas Abortions Spike After Gutting Planned Parenthood

After Republican politicians in Texas defunded the state’s Planned Parenthood programs, abortions shot up among teens, a study found.

In the three years since the Texas legislature cut large swaths of funding from family planning programs and Planned Parenthood, teen abortions increased by 3.1 percent and teen births rose 3.4 percent, reports The Austin Chronicle.

Kami Geoffray, CEO of the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas, explained that the defunding of Planned Parenthood meant the loss of some of the top-tier facilities used to assist with family planning.

“Planned Parenthood clinics are often the best-equipped to offer the right contraceptive choices and have better continuation rates for patients, which leads to a decrease in unintended pregnancies and abortion,” said Geoffray.

She added: “Since implementation of exclusion policies and tiered funding began in 2011, several studies have documented disruptions to the family planning provider network and resulting negative health outcomes for Texas women and families — from an increase in Medicaid births to maternal mortality — further highlighting the critical role Planned Parenthood plays in the family planning safety net.”

The original defunding of Planned Parenthood was reportedly meant to have the effect of decreasing abortions.

“Although the primary stated objective of the funding cuts was to decrease abortion incidents, I find little evidence that reducing family planning funding achieved this goal,” explained Analisa Packham, who was an economics professor at Texas A&M University, and author of the study. Packham is now at University of Miami.

Packham tallied the cost of unintended births at $27,000 each, driving the total expenses for Texas’ Planned Parenthood cut to an estimated $80 million.

The cuts to Planned Parenthood and family planning programs in Texas yielded $76 million in savings.

Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper, a member of Physicians for Reproductive Health, cited nationwide abortion rates as a telling contrast to abortion rates in Texas, according to HuffPost.

“This certainly isn’t the way to have fewer abortions,” said Horvath-Cosper. “The abortion rates nationally have decreased and are at a historic low. So for Texans to see an increase in adolescent abortions is really telling — it seemed to have followed the national trend until these clinics were defunded.”

Republicans are now trying to defund Planned Parenthood on a national level. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has been one of the few members of the GOP to oppose defunding of Planned Parenthood and family planning programs.

“If you’re serious about trying to reduce the number of abortions,” Collins told reporters in March, “the best way to do that is to make family planning more widely available.”  

Sources: The Austin Chronicle, HuffPost / Photo credit: The All-Nite Images/Wikimedia Commons, ProgressOhio/Wikimedia Commons, PBS NewsHour/Wikimedia Commons