Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Announces Closing Of Three Women's Health Centers: For Now, The Bad Guys Have Won

This is discouraging. Here is an excerpt from a Statement from Melaney A. Linton, President and CEO, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, on the closure of Bryan, Huntsville and Lufkin health centers:

State restrictions result in thousands of women likely to face no access to reproductive health care in three rural, underserved communities.

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast has been providing high quality family planning and basic health care in Houston and Southeast Texas for nearly 80 years. Four decades ago the state of Texas asked Planned Parenthood to be a partner in bringing healthcare to the most underserved rural communities. With the generous support of individuals throughout Houston and Southeast Texas, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast has proudly cared for women and men in the underserved communities of Bryan, Lufkin, and Huntsville for nearly forty years.

In recent years, Texas politicians have created an increasingly hostile environment for providers of reproductive health care in underserved communities. Texans with little or no access to health care services have been deeply affected by state budget cuts to programs provided by Planned Parenthood health centers and dozens of others that provided lifesaving cancer screenings, well-woman exams and birth control.

Deplorably, the combined impact of years of budget cuts to women's health care services and the dismantling of the successful Women's Health Program will take affordable, preventive health care options away from women in Bryan, Lufkin and Huntsville -- just as these policies have taken health care away from an estimated 130,000 others -- when Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast is forced to close these family planning health centers at the end of August.

...

It is a travesty that Texas politicians are stripping healthcare from women across the state, harming lives and unraveling the health care safety net that has taken decades to build. As voices in support of women's health continue to grow within the state and as the chorus of alarmed people nationwide focus their attention on Texas politicians, Planned Parenthood will continue to work strongly to eliminate these politicized barriers and to stand up for women in Texas, no matter what.

Supporters can go to standwithtexaswomen.org and tell politicians to stop interfering with women's health.

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast remains committed to continuing to provide women with the health care they have trusted from us for more than 75 years.

(Bolds mine. Background and details are provided in the remainder of the statement.)

Here's my selective curse: May every Texas Republican politician's wife (just about all the GOP politicians are male) and daughter (they don't always tell Daddy what's going on in their lives) find themselves at a loss for reproductive health care when they need it most... because the Planned Parenthood they secretly depended on was killed by Daddy's legislation.

I am always astonished that GOPer legislators and their families, when caught seeking an abortion, offer a rationale why their wife or their daughter may carve out an exception to the GOP policies on abortion... often, especially in the case of the daughters, by going to Planned Parenthood without telling Daddy.

Well, girls, guess what: Daddy is at long last successfully killing Planned Parenthood, and you are now in the position of thousands of less well-off women over the past century, unless you can persuade Daddy to fund your abortion without his disowning you. How does it feel?

God damn hypocritical Republican politicians. God damn them to a Hell of their own making.