The plight of women’s health in Texas has always been a concern of mine. One of my earliest memories involves sitting in a car outside an abortion clinic in Dallas waiting for my mother to come back out of the clinic so that we could drive back home to Sweetwater. From that day to this one, women’s health has figured highly in my thoughts because my mother forbid me or the rest of the children from ever admitting that the trip had even happened. It was that verboten as a subject in Texas. You simply were not allowed to discuss it in polite company.
We had to drive to Dallas because there was no clinic closer to us in Sweetwater than the clinic four hours away in Dallas. Women’s health has only gotten harder to address since that time in the early eighties when we made that road trip.
When the Abortion Barbie, the Texas Republican male’s label for Wendy Davis, stood up and filibustered the latest restrictions on abortion to be proposed by the troglodytes that run our state in 2013, I was one of her greatest supporters. I went out and proudly cast my vote for her in the governor’s race the next year. Anyone who was brave enough to stand up and talk about how essential women’s health is, and how much of women’s health is being made illegal in Texas, was the kind of straight talker I wanted to run my state government.
But she lost, of course. The attacks on women’s health continued unabated. The Republican legislature passed the bill that Wendy Davis had filibustered in the next session of the legislature. Then in 2017 they passed SB8. Slowly, one by one, the remaining women’s health clinics in Texas are closing.
The Planned Parenthood clinic in San Angelo, Texas has closed.
Planned Parenthood was the only place in the region that a woman could go to get birth control pills at a reduced cost. To get mammograms and pap smears done. The only place that poor women could go to see to their basic health needs. I know this because The Wife and I relied on that clinic when we lived in San Angelo. Now that clinic is closed and those women who are still in San Angelo have nowhere else to go.
The promise that Conservative Christianists made, that women’s health would not suffer in Texas because of their war on Planned Parenthood, was an outright lie.
They don’t care about women’s health, they only care about maintaining male control over the female’s reproductive system. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of the story when it comes to why they hate Planned Parenthood.
It is the same reason why the founder of Planned Parenthood was reviled when she started this movement to care for women’s health first and foremost. She was liberating women from their reliance on men, and men don’t like that. It would be nice if these liars were better at telling the lies they tell. At least you could be comfortable in the lies that way.
