The people in the anti-abortion movement endlessly search for knowledge and truth… so that those things can be ruthlessly eliminated. Their most recent victory involved protecting the people of Texas from Yankee-based medical studies — the kind of misleading research that uses facts and figures to cloud what should be a simple matter of preconceived conclusions.
Rick Allgeyer, the director of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, was forced out of his job as punishment for co-authoring a study which concluded that cuts to Planned Parenthood in Texas were impeding access to women’s healthcare across the state. Texas conservatives were upset… not so much by the fact that it was happening, but that somebody said that it was happening.
The study was published in a notorious tabloid rag called The New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal in the country. Evidently, the article ended up there after Breitbart turned it down.
Texas barred Planned Parenthood from state health programs in 2013, the same year that the state enacted harsh TRAP laws that closed abortion clinics across the state. It was all part of a conservative push to encourage teen motherhood and breast cancer.
The study concluded that the actions against Planned Parenthood reduced the number of women who were able to get IUDs and increased the number of births covered by Medicaid. Texas State Senator Jane Nelson, a longtime foe of abortion rights, called the study a “…deeply flawed and highly political report,” a conclusion she reached after realizing it didn’t say what she wanted it to say.
Now that a 20-year employee of state government has been fired over authoring a scientific study, maybe other state workers in Texas will think twice before they think.