(This image of an ancient Roman childbirth is from the website jashford.com.)It's fairly easy to tell when a Texas Republican is lying -- it's when their lips are moving. The latest outrageous lie was the one they told to get their anti-woman and anti-choice bill through the special section (which closed down 37 out of 42 Texas clinics that did abortion procedures). The GOP said it was to protect women's health. Not true. What they did was to put women in more danger than before.
All one has to do is look at the statistics to see this. The rate of women's death from an abortion procedure is 0.6 per 100,000, while the rate for women's deaths in childbirth ranges between 8.8 and 12.7 depending on the study used. It is far more dangerous for a woman to carry a child to term.
But it gets even worse. Childbirth deaths of a mother have been rising in the United States. The CIA Factbook lists the United States as 48th in lowest number of deaths from childbirth. Amnesty International say the U.S. is 50th. That puts us behind every other developed nation (and a few others), in spite of spending twice as much money on childbirth. And in Texas, the rate is far worse than other states -- a 24.63 rate per 100,000 women.
The GOP now acts like it is worried about women's health -- and they are spending money to find out why the Texas rate is so high. What they should do is look in the mirror -- that's where they'd see the biggest cause. And it's not just this latest anti-woman bill. The previous legislature also decided to not give funds to Planned Parenthood and other clinics for the poor (even though most of them did not perform abortions. It was a political move designed to appeal to their right-wing base -- but it resulted in clinics closing that offered thousands of Texas women their only access to health care.
By closing health clinics across the state (by slashing or eliminating their funding), and by refusing to expand Medicaid, the state GOP has assured that many poor women will not have access to proper health care. It is more than disingenuous for them to now say they care about women's health. It is obvious that they care far more about their religious dogma and political ideology than the health of Texas women.
