Want a look at the near future of a United States in which Republicans have defunded Planned Parenthood? Texas and Wisconsin have already done just that, barring Planned Parenthood from accepting Medicaid patients. The end result is not that women are getting their health care from 100 percent abortion-free providers, it’s that women are not getting the health care they need.
In Texas, Mike Austin, the head of a community health organization that provides similar services to a Planned Parenthood that shut down, says “I hate to say it, but I think an awful lot of women just opted to go without care.” And he should know. Before it closed, the local Planned Parenthood sent Austin’s organization its patient records, to help people make the transition easily.
But to Austin’s dismay, only about 100 former Planned Parenthood patients ever showed up at his door.
“We are seeing a subsequent rise in STDs and a subsequent rise in unplanned pregnancies,” Austin said. He believes they could be linked. “And I’m sitting here going, ‘See? I told you so. This is what happens.’”
It’s not just Texas:
Shawano County, Wisconsin, which is experiencing a flare-up in gonorrhea and which the state government recently designated a hot-spot for new chlamydia infections, is still feeling the pressure. After the Planned Parenthood there closed, former patients faced significant waiting lists to see a doctor at local community health clinics. The health department didn’t know where to send women for certain services.
“The clinic that closed in Shawano served the whole county,” said Jaime Bodden, the Shawano County health director. Not just women on Medicaid, she said, but women with stingy insurance and women with no insurance at all. Now, the county health department is virtually on its own as it combats the region’s rising STI rates.
“It’s something that we still often talk about,” she said. “We say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have Planned Parenthood in town?’”
If and when Paul Ryan and the rest of them get their way, there are going to be a whole lot more places where health professionals (and, heaven knows, patients) look around at STD rates and unplanned pregnancy rates and say “Wouldn’t it be nice to have Planned Parenthood in town?”
Source
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/rEmZD1pc7fw/-Texas-and-Wisconsin-offer-an-exciting-preview-of-a-post-Planned-Parenthood-STI-filled-America
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