It’s been over three years since Texas stopped funding Planned Parenthood and cut funding to any organization that offers abortions. As a result, the number of women who use birth control have gone down and the birth rate has gone up.
A study by the The New England Journal of Medicine published Wednesday shows that the number of women who file insurance claims for both long-acting reversible and injectable contraceptives (like IUDs and implants), have significantly gone down—And if women aren’t filing claims for these types of birth control, it means they aren’t using them. For women using long-acting reversible contraception, the number of claims dropped by 35.5 percent. That’s a lot!
During that same three-year period from 2011 to 2014, a 1.9 birthing rate increase occurred in the areas where state-owned Planned Parenthood clinics used to exist. So what happened? Because Planned Parenthood was no longer covered in many women’s insurance programs, they couldn’t afford contraceptives anymore. And if you can’t use birth control? It doesn’t take a genius to predict that you’re much more likely to have more babies. Not to mention that it’s poor women who are feeling the worst effects of this—Yahoo! reports that before they were defunded, Planned Parenthood clinics served 60 percent of Texas’s low-income women.
Cosmopolitan calls these results as proof that “what’s happening in Texas is a preview of what happens when you take away health care from women.” Not giving women the choice to be able to take contraceptives or have an abortion by employing Planned Parenthood’s services is making a huge difference in their lives—And it’s heartbreaking knowing that these women have lost such an important resource to them due to the witholding of funds.