Texas has a habit of pushing women to the edge of the conversation, but when it comes to healthcare policy the state straight up throws them off a cliff.
Examples of Texas’ decisions to deprioritize women’s healthcare can be found in the state’s maternal mortality rate and the state’s pronounced lack of women’s clinics.
One of the factors contributing to the lawmakers’ inability to see past the collective ends of their noses and focus on women’s health, is the fact that any discussion of women’s health tends to get hijacked by people waving signs and screaming about dead babies.
Despite the importance of abortion to women’s healthcare, it is not the end-all-be-all in reproductive health or reproductive rights.
Women across Texas face almost as many obstacles accessing contraception as they do trying to access abortion. Those difficulties become exponentially more pronounced for women in lower-income and rural communities.
Texas has 147 counties without an OB-GYN, 158 counties without a surgeon and 35 counties without any doctor. The non-profit Power to Decide has termed the large swats of the state without reproductive healthcare “contraceptive deserts”
Below is a Power to Decide graphic detailing the needs in Texas.
The distance, time and costs associated with traveling hundreds of miles to a doctor are forcing some women to go without care. Although lawmakers have tried to fix the problem — mostly by paying lip service to Texas’ maternal mortality rate — all attempts to improve women’s healthcare have suffered ignominious deaths beneath the Capitol’s Pink Dome.
Although Texas legislators ignored the key finding of the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force and refused to expand Medicaid, the state has made a cold comfort offering by launching a newly redesigned healthytexaswomen.org.
The website allows certain Texas women to sign up for the Texas Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicaid-lite plan, which might provide them with some form of coverage. To qualify for the Healthy Texas Women plan a woman has to be 18-44 years old, not pregnant, uninsured a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant making less than 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level.
That means that a single woman needs to make less than $2,010 per month to qualify. Additionally, the clinics aren’t evenly distributed throughout the state. If a woman in Cross Plains needs to use the Healthy Texas Women program for breast or cervical cancer services, she’ll wind up driving 50 miles on one way to Abilene or Commanche.
Despite the best efforts of Texas’ DHHS, women women in Texas are not getting access to the birth control they want or are being told conflicting data. In 2018, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found that about two-thirds of “low income” women’s requests for their preferred form of contraception were ignored by doctors.
The study looked at how 685 new mothers were treated during their first post-partum doctors’ visit, typically referred to as the six-week checkup. Because of the doctors’ refusal to provide women their preferred form of contraception, around 58 percent left the office with no birth control at all and only 8 percent took what the doctors offered.
The authors found that intrauterine devices, IUDs, and contraceptive implants were the most difficult to get, with only 10 percent of the low-income women that requested the devices receiving them.
It’s not just low-income women who aren’t able to get their preferred form of birth control. A recent study in the Journal of American College Health found that about 38 percent of women attending Texas community colleges regularly can’t get their preferred form of birth control.
A similar study from UT-Austin’s Population Research Center found that Texas students are citing financial barriers and a lack of affordable insurance as reasons why they can’t access their preferred form of birth control.
“We — as in colleges [and] clinics — could be doing a better job in helping women to get the more effective methods they want to be using,” Kristine Hopkins, the lead author of the UT report, said.