Andrea Grimes is a freelance journalist living in Austin with her husband and three cats. She studied new media at New York University and has a master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas. She is exceptionally talented at finding good-to-great parking spaces.
Passionately anti-choice Texas House Representative Bill Zedler couldn’t get the legislation he wanted approved in last year’s lawmaking session–he’d like to know as much as possible about women seeking, and doctors performing, abortions–so instead of pursuing the consent of his peers in the legislature, he got the Texas Department of State Health Services to do it for him. So much for democracy.
![Rally in Austin, outside the Texas Dept. of Health. [img src]](http://rhrealitycheck.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/../../files/teaser-images/2012-04-03-grimes-187x125.jpg)
When clients come to the Downtown Planned Parenthood Clinic in Austin, Texas, they’re coming to get what they’ve always gotten: contraception, cancer screenings and STI tests. But what they’re getting, if they’re on the newly defunded Medicaid Women’s Health Program, is bad news: Planned Parenthood can’t see them any more.
What will it look like to have no federal Women’s Health Program in Texas? That’s what the state department of Health and Human Services began figuring out last week when Governor Rick Perry and Texas lawmakers opted to cut Planned Parenthood out of the Women’s Health Program in the state.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Texas lawmakers, as many as 400,000 Texas women will have no or greatly reduced access to basic preventative and reproductive health care beginning today.
When Virginia legislators first began considering a forced trans-vaginal ultrasound bill, progressives wondered: “What kind of world are we living in, when “informed consent” is tantamount to state-sanctioned rape?” Here’s what kind of world: the kind wherein a mandatory ultrasound law scads worse than the proposed Virginia bill has already been in place for five months. In Texas. And right now there may be no feasible legal way to stop it.
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State health officials in Texas say asking women a few questions can dramatically decrease their alcohol use during pregnancy.
The best way to find out what a Perry presidency would look like for women and social issues writ large? Look at what far-right, conservative, religious and evangelical power players want him to do; whatever it is, he’ll do it.
Is there a link between an anti-choice group goading Facebook followers into sharing their anti-choice savior fantasies and violent anti-choice vigilante justice?
The Texas Independent reports today on violations ranging from fire safety to client privacy in Texas’ many “alternatives to abortion” contractors.
I spent my formative years believing my body, my life and my choices were not my own, but a kind of joint property between myself, God, my parents and my church friends and family. As such, my body and my behavior was up for discussion and judgment. Is it any wonder then, that I’m afraid, as a single woman, to be pregnant?
