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Women Aren’t The Only Texans Grappling With Changes To Health Care Access
In this Nov. 15, 2008 photograph, marchers in downtown Houston demand equal rights for LGBTQIA people. (Flickr / griepp)
October 13, 2014
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Women Aren’t The Only Texans Grappling With Changes To Health Care Access

Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News

Both sides of the conflict over the Texas Omnibus Abortion Law (HB2) link abortion to issues surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity.

In January 2013, at the beginning of the biennial legislative session, anti-abortion legislators and other groups held an event called the Rally For Life. Attended by thousands, the rally was designed to build support for the passage of HB2. The bill would ultimately fail to pass in that legislative session, requiring Gov. Rick Perry to call two successive special sessions of the Legislature before he could sign it into law.

Perry attended the Rally For Life, along with other members of the state government. Attorney General and current gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott explicitly mentioned his opposition to gay marriage in Texas during his speech.

“I know this session, working together, we’ll be able to cement the fact that Texas is the most pro-family, pro-life, pro-value state in America,” Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told the crowd, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Read moreWomen Aren’t The Only Texans Grappling With Changes To Health Care Access
Texans Build A Diverse Movement For Reproductive Choice And Health Care
Protesters crowd the halls of the Texas Capitol building just before midnight on June 25, 2013, shouting down an anti-abortion bill. (Flickr / Blackbird Film Co.)
October 7, 2014
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Texans Build A Diverse Movement For Reproductive Choice And Health Care

Posted in Austin, Journalism, and MintPress News

What does it mean to have a choice?

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Americans’ right to choose an abortion, but that choice is meaningless if someone can’t access a legal abortion clinic or legally obtain the abortion pill. Decades of the anti-abortion movement’s attacks on abortion access depend on this, and it’s a strategy which may have just won a major victory.

The challenge of accessing abortion just became far more difficult for millions of Texans. On Thursday, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court upheld all provisions of HB2, the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill. As a result of the ruling, all but eight of the clinics in Texas providing abortions closed on Friday. Many Texans depended on these clinics for essential medical care beyond abortions.

Other provisions of the bill already restricted access to abortions after 20 weeks and access to the abortion pill, and added onerous requirements on abortion providers to receive hospital admitting privileges, which are often refused by the mostly Catholic hospitals in the state.

“This decision is a vindication of the careful deliberation by the Texas Legislature to craft a law to protect the health and safety of Texas women,” Lauren Bean, a spokesperson for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told Fox News.

“Texas faces a health care crisis, brought on by its own legislators,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, a group of abortion providers that were party to the legal challenge, told RH Reality Check.

Read moreTexans Build A Diverse Movement For Reproductive Choice And Health Care