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What's wrong with Texas?

 
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:05 pm    Post subject: What's wrong with Texas? Reply with quote

Some apparently don't know about the Nation. They cover both corruption and the war on the poor. From Katha Pollitt:

Quote:
Texans like to boast that their state is oversized on everything from job creation to cowboy hats, but its latest big news is nothing to be proud of. According to a just-released report from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, maternal mortality doubled in the state from 2011 to 2014. Unbelievably, Texas now has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. The United States as a whole is pretty shameful on that score, to be sure, with a rate that places it between Qatar and Bahrain. Moreover, the national rate has been rising in recent years—California is the only state that has managed to significantly lower maternal mortality. Even so, Texas is way out of line. What gives?

Opinion writers have been quick to point the finger at the state’s assault on birth control and abortion. In 2013, Texas passed stringent regulations that forced half of the state’s abortion clinics to close. Previously, in 2011, Texas had pursued its jihad against abortion by slashing its family-planning budget (which includes care for pregnant and postpartum women) by two-thirds in order to defund Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that its network of clinics was the single largest provider of reproductive-health care for low-income women. At least 53 clinics—many of them not affiliated with Planned Parenthood—closed; others scaled back their hours and services. What remained of the family-planning budget went to general-purpose community clinics and other health-care providers who struggled to fill the gap. As a result, fewer women were able to access long-acting contraception, and more women had unplanned or unwanted pregnancies—including women already in poor health, for whom pregnancy was not advisable. More women couldn’t obtain an abortion, lacked an entry point into prenatal care, or started that care later.


Even the state’s mammoth loss in the Supreme Court, which overturned its severe restrictions on abortion, has had little effect.

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.”

As I write, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission is poised to pass a rule requiring women seeking abortion or who have a miscarriage to arrange for the burial or cremation of their fetus, no matter how early the termination. What’s a little maternal mortality compared to keeping Ebola out of the water supply?
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 8:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Does this guy EVER post ANYTHING positive about ANYTHING?

Is EVERY thread he starts intended to start a fight?

Why does he consider himself liberal, when tolerance does not exist in his social, geographic, or psychological world?

The question is thus, "What's wrong with mac?"
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mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 9:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

High-conflict people (HCPs) have a pattern of high-conflict behavior that increases conflict rather than reducing or resolving it.

"Persons with HCP tend to have several things in common. They initiate and receive reward from conflict with others, and they are usually at the center of whatever conflict is occurring. They appear to treat conflict as normal and expected in their interactions, to a point at which conflict becomes a defining aspect of relationships. They are adept at escalating conflict and at blaming others. At the same time, they have great difficulty seeing things through the eyes of others and they are extremely reluctant to take responsibility in their lives or to accept blame when things go wrong. They are often referred to as “chronic blamers.” They tend to be emotional, aggressive, mistrustful and controlling. They easily see themselves as victims, and they are extremely resistant to acknowledging that they may have contributed, in even the smallest way, to making a situation difficult.

For people with HCP, the world appears in black and white. Others are either with them or against them. They have little or no insight into their own behavior, and they are easily threatened by interpretations of behaviors that do not comport with their own worldview."

http://www.pchtreatment.com/high-conflict-personality-treatment-center/
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 9:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Proud of Texas? The war on women? Or the war on the poor? Mrgybe and Isobars ignore the results.
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