[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Maybe I'm wrong, but lamenting the rollback of "human rights directly affecting women" (to avoid critique) didn't seem like it had a question in it.

I don't think it's ridiculous to feel it's "utterly ####ing depressing" to see someone look at the sentence "women's right are being restricted thanks to legislation outlawing abortion" and think the term "women's rights" is the most egregious part of the sentence.

Personally, I don't care if you call it women's rights or human rights, or how you feel about identity politics because it just does not matter. This election cycle has given rise the restriction of the rights of women to decide whether an abortion is right for them or not. That is a huge problem.

Not just abortion but Family Planning and women's health in general, which has implications of life and death on women in the united states, and, you probably guessed it, Black women are overly represented. In texas, black women represent 11% of pregnancies seen in hospitals but are 29% of the mortality rate for expectant and delivery mothers.

The rate at which women die during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth has fallen sharply in many nations as maternal care has improved. The United States — and particularly Texas — is a glaring exception.

In Texas, for instance, according to a study in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, the maternal mortality ratio — maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — doubled to 35.8 in 2014 from 17.7 in 2000. Compare that with Germany, which had 4.1 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2014.

In California, that figure fell from 21.5 in 2003 to 15.1 in 2014, but in the remaining 48 states and the District of Columbia it increased from 18.8 in 2000 to 23.8 in 2014. The United States as a whole had the second-highest maternal mortality ratio among 31 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only Mexico had a higher figure.

It’s certainly ironic that Texas legislators claimed to be closing clinics to protect women’s health while ignoring the real public-health crisis of mounting maternal mortality. But the full story is more complex—and even sadder. “The closure of abortion clinics isn’t related to this reported increase in maternal mortality, which predated it by two years,” said Daniel Grossman, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, when we discussed the issue. He’s also the director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health and an investigator for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. “The family-planning cuts may have been a contributing factor,” Grossman continued—a second study, released in July by the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force and Department of State Health Services, suggests that they were—“but there had to be something else going on.” One is the opioid epidemic: Overdosing is the second-biggest cause of maternal mortality in Texas. Another is racism: In Texas, the maternal-mortality rate for white women is in step with their pregnancy rate; for Hispanic women, it’s actually lower. But black women are 11.4 percent of all pregnant women in the state and a whopping 29 percent of those who die.

Before I started working on this column, I pictured maternal mortality as death during pregnancy or childbirth. In fact, the statistics include every form of death except non-pregnancy-related cancer and accidents for up to a year after the pregnancy’s end. (This would include deaths from abortion, but despite the concerns of Texas politicians, there seem to have been none of these.) Most Texas women who died post-pregnancy didn’t do so in the delivery room, but six weeks or more after childbirth. The three top causes: cardiac events, drug overdoses, and hypertension.

Some of the women who died may have gotten pregnant because their family-planning clinic closed, and a few may have died because they stayed pregnant when denied access to an abortion. But as all the experts I interviewed stressed, we don’t know enough to state that for sure. We do know that most of them died because they were low-income women who lacked good medical care. A lot of them were on Medicaid—and in Texas, that means extreme poverty: Texas is one of 19 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. If the women were eligible for the state’s emergency Medicaid program, their coverage ended 60 days after the birth. Help with drug abuse is scarce, as is mental-health care (suicide was the seventh leading cause of maternal mortality). “Women need pre-conception care and continuity of care,” said Katrina Anderson, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “What they get is the opposite.”

Joe Potter, principal investigator at the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, said that while we don’t have enough data to explain the deaths yet, “the report is a wake-up call. Cutting the budget to grind these clinics to a close did considerable damage to the women’s health-care safety net.”

So is Texas woke now? Hardly. Even its mammoth loss in the Supreme Court, which overturned the state’s severe restrictions on abortion access, seems to have had little effect. Texas has just given $1.6 million in women’s health-care funding to Carol Everett, an anti-abortion activist who runs a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers.” Neither Everett nor her organization, the Heidi Group, has any experience providing medical services. Media Matters has compiled a long list of her wacky views, including that abortions are frequently performed on women who are not pregnant; that the disposal of fetal tissue could spread HIV or Ebola through the air or water supply; that abortion clinics routinely give women defective birth control to create more business; and that emergency contraception is “destructive to a woman’s reproductive system” and “a social experiment on children.”