The End of Family Planning in Texas

It's been a banner year for Texas' pro-life movement. In May, lawmakers approved state-issued "Choose Life" license plates, with proceeds earmarked for medically questionable, anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy" centers. A few days later they passed a bill requiring women to undergo a sonogram, listen to a fetal heartbeat and hear a "detailed description" of her fetus before having an abortion. And they also, if you believe their gleeful soundbites, "defunded Planned Parenthood," a description that painted a picture of a publicly funded abortion mill finally brought to its filthy knees.

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"It was an easy choice to cut out a family-planning organization like [Planned Parenthood]," said state Representative Leo Berman.

Anna Merlan

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Of all the bills passed this year, this last one makes pro-life leaders especially proud. The key provisions of the sonogram bill are stalled in court and unlikely to ever be enforced. Funding license plates doesn't have the rhetorical fireworks to anchor a campaign ad. But "defunding Planned Parenthood"? Those are three powerful words on the Republican re-election circuit.

Take Leo Berman. The representative from Smith County, in eastern Texas, backed some losing horses this year — insisting the president was born in Kenya, demanding to see his birth certificate, trying to have English established as the "official language" of Texas. But he also supported the "defunding," which in reality was the diversion of about $73 million out of the state's "family planning" budget — federal grant money that covers birth control, contraception and other services that aren't — that can't be — abortion.

But you wouldn't know that from talking to Berman.

"Since 1973, how many abortions have been performed in this country?" he asks. "I can tell you. It's 55 million. An organization like Planned Parenthood — just listen to the name of the organization, Planned Parenthood — was responsible for the large majority of those 55 million abortions. It was an easy choice for me to cut out a family-planning organization like that."

Representative Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Mineola, takes it even further, insisting that Planned Parenthood's many services — birth control, contraception, cancer screenings — are all merely pretexts to provide abortions. "The shell game is not hard to figure out," he wrote in the Texas Tribune. "For every dollar Planned Parenthood receives in taxpayer money, a dollar of Planned Parenthood's unrestricted funds are freed up to pay for abortions."

Even lawmakers who believe that Planned Parenthood actually exists to provide services other than abortions — services that in reality make up 97 percent of its work — don't always differentiate between abortion, birth control or general medical care. Representative Wayne Christian, who represents Nacogdoches and surrounding areas, told Texas Tribune: "Of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that's what family planning is supposed to be about." Women seeking real healthcare, these politicians say, can easily go elsewhere.

"Healthcare access for poor women is made possible through Medicaid and volunteer organizations in the cities and states of Texas," Berman says. "We defunded Planned Parenthood. That's what we did."

The narrative these lawmakers have constructed obscures some basic facts, as most lawmaker-constructed narratives do. Abortions, at Planned Parenthood and wherever else they're performed, aren't funded by taxpayer money. They haven't been for nearly 40 years. And in the end, the funding cuts these lawmakers tout had little impact on access to abortions.

Still, somehow, they insist they've scored a clear victory.

"We picked our battles very carefully and very measured," Berman says. "We picked them to win. And we did win."

Family-planning funding is only the latest target in Texas lawmakers' war on abortion, which this group and its predecessors have been working to make functionally illegal for decades.

"For the last 20 years, every session there's always some anti-choice legislation proposed," says Susan Hays, a Dallas attorney who's helped fight the sonogram law and is a former local Democratic chairwoman. In 2005, Panhandle Representative Warren Chisum filed a bill to protect life "from the point of conception." The bill failed, so he re-introduced it two years later, while Houston Senator Dan Patrick did the same. Both failed the same way — referred to a committee and left there to be forgotten.

This session, abortion bans were back on the table. But, like previous efforts, the bans "have been fairly easy to defeat, because they're so hardcore," Hays says. "There are plenty of moderate Republicans, even pro-life Republicans, who think they go too far, and [the bills] are quietly killed."

Instead, over the years, lawmakers have increasingly settled for trying to make abortions harder to get, through an ever-more tangled thicket of restrictions and conditions. The first significant step came in 2003, when Governor Rick Perry signed the Woman's Right to Know Act, requiring doctors to tell women seeking abortions about alternatives, and to give them material stating that abortion might increase their risk of breast cancer — a medically dubious claim disputed by virtually every major medical body. The law also put in place a 24-hour waiting period.

In 2004, lawmakers passed a law requiring teenagers under 18 to notify their parents before receiving an abortion. Two years later that morphed into a "parental consent" clause, which was criticized by pro-choice groups for its potential effects on teens who are from abusive homes or are victims of incest — kids who might fear telling their parent, lest it lead to abuse or worse. A judicial bypass exception was created, allowing pregnant teens to ask a judge to waive the consent requirement. But studies show that the bypass system often fails teens who don't know about it or can't maneuver the courts system to successfully lobby a judge.