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As reported by the Houston Chronicle, "In Texas, limits on abortion get the big headlines. But access to effective birth control has been weakened in the crossfire. When lawmakers kicked Planned Parenthood out of the state's Women's Health Program in 2013, they assured Texans that women would find providers elsewhere for family planning. This week, a University of Texas study published in the New England Journal of Medicine produced strong evidence that Texas has failed to fill the void. In counties affected by the Planned Parenthood exclusion, claims for long-acting contraceptives dropped by more than 35 percent, and requests for injectable contraceptives dropped 31 percent. Meanwhile, Medicaid-paid births spiked among women who previously had used injectable methods."<ref>[http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/columnists/falkenberg/article/The-numbers-don-t-lie-Texans-need-access-to-6812535.php The numbers don't lie: Texans need access to birth control]</ref> | As reported by the Houston Chronicle, "In Texas, limits on abortion get the big headlines. But access to effective birth control has been weakened in the crossfire. When lawmakers kicked Planned Parenthood out of the state's Women's Health Program in 2013, they assured Texans that women would find providers elsewhere for family planning. This week, a University of Texas study published in the New England Journal of Medicine produced strong evidence that Texas has failed to fill the void. In counties affected by the Planned Parenthood exclusion, claims for long-acting contraceptives dropped by more than 35 percent, and requests for injectable contraceptives dropped 31 percent. Meanwhile, Medicaid-paid births spiked among women who previously had used injectable methods."<ref>[http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/columnists/falkenberg/article/The-numbers-don-t-lie-Texans-need-access-to-6812535.php The numbers don't lie: Texans need access to birth control]</ref> | ||
Furthermore, the decreased accessibility of affordable birth control has increased pregnancy rates. As reported by the LA Times, "The researchers calculated that the relative increase in births was 27% for women who lost access to Planned Parenthood. Many of these births were probably unplanned, since the increase was only seen in counties where women faced new hurdles in access to contraception, the study authors wrote... The study doesn’t prove that the change in Texas policy was directly responsible for the increase in births, the researchers noted. But after making it more difficult for women to get safe, reliable birth control, women switched to less reliable contraceptive methods, or skipped them altogether. The result is dozens of additional babies born to some of the thousands of women who had been served by the shuttered clinics."<ref>[http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-planned-parenthood-texas-births-20160203-story.html After Texas stopped funding Planned Parenthood, low-income women had more babies]</ref> | |||
===What to Get & Where to Get It=== | ===What to Get & Where to Get It=== |
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