Budget cuts to family planning have a cost
By Veronica Flores-Paniagua/Express-News
Updated 12:01 a.m., Saturday, February 19, 2011
The irony shouldn't be lost on anyone that, on the same day the state Senate passed the sonogram bill that supporters hope will stave off some abortions, the attorney general issued twin rulings that could limit impoverished women's access to family planning services.
This unfolds while lawmakers are contemplating sharp reductions in family-planning funding for services that help reduce the number of Medicaid-paid births and unplanned pregnancies.
What's next? A law that keeps women in bare feet?
Thursday's rulings from state Attorney General Greg Abbott target Planned Parenthood. The organization has offered reproductive health services to women through the fledgling, state-funded Women's Health Program since 2007. Sen. Robert Deuell, R-Greenville, a physician and chairman of the Senate Nominations Committee, sought the opinion to support his contention that Planned Parenthood's family planning clinics shouldn't be eligible for WHP funding because the clinic network also includes abortion facilities.
The 2005 law setting up the Women's Health Program outright excludes abortion providers and affiliates of abortion providers. But, according to the Texas Tribune, Health and Human Services Commission officials for years overlooked the rule, apparently concerned that shutting out Planned Parenthood clinics might be unconstitutional. Abbott's other ruling, sought by HHSC Commissioner Tom Suehs regarding the agency's authority to define the term “affiliate,” assured Suehs that HHSC does, indeed, have the right to do so.
Longtime efforts by anti-abortion supporters to eliminate public funding of any Planned Parenthood services easily become the focal point. (In Washington on Friday, the House voted to cut the organization off from all federal funding.) Deuell, for his part, told the Tribune he doesn't like the family planning services provider, but insisted that wasn't his motive.
Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of reproductive health care and family planning services in Texas under the Women's Health Program. Last year, nine of its South Texas clinics, including four in San Antonio, served nearly 5,300 women via WHP.
For all the heat that Abbott's rulings are generating, however, there's another troubling movement: The state budget draft reduces family planning funding by almost $12 million over the next biennium. With her testimony before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month, Dr. Janet Realini, president of the San Antonio-based Healthy Futures of Texas, tried to drive home the fiscal cost of unplanned pregnancies.
Medicaid-paid unplanned births? In 2007, that rang up to more than $1.2 billion.
Another consequence of poor family planning: premature births. About 13 percent of Texas babies are born prematurely, Realini told lawmakers. Average first-year medical costs for premature babies in Texas are $1.7 billion, 67 percent of that coming from Medicaid.
Even as the human cost gets lost in the rhetoric, surely the dollar signs should capture lawmakers' attention.
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