Blame Planned Parenthood for dearth of Texas abortion clinics today
Yesterday there were 21 abortion clinics in Texas, today there are eight.
Thanks to a federal Fifth Circuit Court ruling that allows the state to immediately begin enforcing part of a pro-life law that had been enjoined by a judge in April, the unshackled statute forces abortion clinics to meet the same physical requirements as other ambulatory surgical treatment centers. It also requires that abortionists have admitting privileges within 30 miles of a clinic.
No surprise, when the decision came down late yesterday afternoon the abortion lobby proclaimed an apocalypse. Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards tweeted:
Catastrophic decision for women in TX, whose access to safe & legal abortion will be wiped out in much of the state: http://t.co/PSe4uz55BB
— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) October 3, 2014
This was interesting, since Planned Parenthood is largely to blame for the scorched earth abortion clinic landscape in its leader’s home state.
Beginning today, Planned Parenthood will hold an abortion monopoly in Texas, owning five of the remaining eight clinics.
Two of Planned Parenthood’s five are brand new additions, built, ironically while independent clinics were filing a lawsuit claiming the stricter clinic guidelines would be nearly impossible to meet. How embarrassing.
It cannot be coincidental that Planned Parenthood placed these two new clinics in the same cities as existing rival independent abortion clinics - Dallas and San Antonio.
This in a state that is 268,601 square miles, larger than France and Greece combined. There was nowhere else for Planned Parenthood to build?
This after Richards lamented that pregnant mothers might have to drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion. Planned Parenthood couldn’t spread abortion access around a bit?
I previously explained how Planned Parenthood has such deep pockets.
But one other aspect relevant here is why Texas independent mills have no nest egg, pardon the pun, to fall back on.
There are certainly those owners who don’t manage their finances well. But if 13 out of 21 clinics were forced to shut down today, having failed to improve – or make plans to improve – their facilities with over a year’s warning, there is something else going on.
That is, Planned Parenthood, with all its other resources, has been able to keep abortion market prices artificially low, forcing independent clinics to operate without any margin.
Planned Parenthood is able to come in to town like a Wal-Mart or a grocery store chain or any other big business and engage in price wars until the competition goes under. As a contender complained:
Ms. Hagstrom Miller… says she can’t match the nonprofit’s budget for advertising or clinic upgrades. She has carved her own niche by touting her care as more holistic - and by charging $425 for a first-trimester surgery at her Austin clinic, compared with $475 at the local Planned Parenthood….
“They’re not unlike other big national chains,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said. “They put local independent businesses in a tough situation.”
That was 2008. Hagstrom’s Austin clinic closed this past July. Planned Parenthood’s Austin clinic is one of Texas’s eight still still standing today.
This is how it came to be that so many indie abortion clinics were so financially weak when the Texas legislature passed HB2 last year, and how Planned Parenthood now owns 63% of the abortion clinics in Texas.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
All the “creative” bookkeeping practices of PP will come out full bore once all the little fish are eaten up by the Abortion Giant.
Texas is well-positioned to defund Planned Parenthood.
They have a pro-life legislature and governor (and none of that appears likely to change in November).
They have a pro-life constituency of voters.
They have whistleblowers and plenty of evidence for Medicaid fraud by PP.
Honestly, the fact that PP’s market share of abortion keeps going up is good for pro-lifers in one way: It proves that PP really IS invested in abortion.
If I had a nickel for every idiot who told me “Abortion is only, like, um, 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services! They do soooo much good stuff for women, like, really!”, I’d be well-off by now.
Then when you tell them PP does more than 300,000 abortions every year? **Crickets.** They just cover their eyes and ears and walk away, believing what PP says.
“Texas is well-positioned to defund Planned Parenthood.”
I thought they already did.
OMG! You are right, JDC!
I had to research the story again. Texas defunded Planned Parenthood, then Obama cut off some $200 million in retaliation so that Texas women couldn’t get help from anywhere.
Texas responded by cutting other budgets, and the liberal media outlets responded by saying that women can’t get healthcare anywhere but Planned Parenthood, and now they are suffering for it.
Meanwhile, conservative news media didn’t find a story and low-income Texas women seem be getting better healthcare elsewhere. And the PP abortion clinic in College Station closed (Abby Johnson’s old store), with traffic down and fraud charges looming.
Don’t forget that many people sunk millions into the completely hopeless Wendy Davis campaign, money that could have been spent on upgrading the mills that needed it.
Planned Parenthood had a huge role in promoting her campaign and encouraging people to give which they knew would result in the abortion mills not having funds to upgrade.
Planned Parenthood is smart and strategic.
[…] Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of these guidelines on October 2, effectively shuttering 13 unstandardized abortion clinics around […]
Texas readers (or anyone else with the information): regarding the closed PP centers in Texas, did they just stop doing abortions or did they close down altogether? If the latter, that’s purely a business decision by PP. I listened to one of my NH state legislators ask a PP rep if PP would drop abortions, the “3%”, if doing so would eliminate concerns about the state doing business with an abortion provider. Her answer: no.
I had to research the story again. Texas defunded Planned Parenthood, then Obama cut off some $200 million in retaliation so that Texas women couldn’t get help from anywhere.
It looks like you didn’t research it very thoroughly. Federal law (42 US C. 1396a (23)(a,b)) does not permit Medicaid assistance to go to state programs that restrict a Medicaid recipient’s ability to choose his or her medical provider. Texas knew that it was voting to render itself ineligible for federal assistance to the WHP (about $35 million, not $200 million). Politicians who are claiming retaliation on Obama’s part are just cynically exploiting the gullibility of people who don’t know better than to believe what they read on pseudo-news blogs.
Speaking of which, anyone who clicked on the link to “price war” in the above post saw that the definition of “price war” was “commercial competition characterized by the repeated cutting of prices below those of competitors.” (Emphasis added). That doesn’t fit the example given, in which one of PP’s competitors lowered her price once. You’ll also notice the total absence of an explanation for why Jill thinks the $475 price is “artificially low” (though not as low as PP’s competitors). And if it were true that PP was a for-profit business, then it would have raised prices once it became the only abortion provider in town. No evidence of that is given here.
This story isn’t as much of a whopper as a claim that “it is true” that Christians were opposing genocide 2000 years ago, but it’s pretty high on the list of stories that rely on misdirection and the absence of information. Jill, I understand why you don’t respect the intelligence of people who trust you for news. But it’s still not nice to misinform them.
Meanwhile, conservative news media didn’t find a story and low-income Texas women seem be getting better healthcare elsewhere.
In the real world, the number of low-income women getting WHP services dropped significantly, and physicians’ groups complained about getting stuck with patients who needed further health care that a for-profit physician couldn’t afford to subsidize.
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/09/limited-scope-texas-womens-health-program-has-cons/