Well, Duh.
Okay, so we have a problem in Texas.
Within a two-year period between 2010 and 2012, the rate of pregnant women dying in Texas doubled – and it’s not entirely clear why.
Well, here, let me wipe off your glasses.
In 2011, the state Legislature cut Texas’ family planning and women’s health program, which provide care and routine screenings for low-income women. Lawmakers slashed its budget by two-thirds—and kicked out women’s health providers that also provide abortions.
Okay, so we cut funds for women’s health care and everybody is stumped, just completely stumped, why the mother mortality rate doubled.
Researches are stumped because they “didn’t see this in other states.”
Look at a damn map, researchers. Texas is big, real big. If the clinic closes in your town, it’s not like you can jump on the metro and go to the next town. It can be a ten hour drive to the next clinic.
Our right-to-life state legislators decided that their religion was more more important than women’s deaths. Period.
Women who do not get pre-natal care die at a higher rate than those who do. Period. That’s the cause.
But, and you’re gonna love this part of the research, women a expendable.
“It’s a great concern,” she says. “Maternal deaths are deaths of young women that have families. They probably have other children they have husbands. The ripple effect is huge for these deaths.”
So, our worth is determined by our husbands or other children. How about not killing off women because they are human beings?
Okay, I’ll put away the soap box. But I know where I put it and I can get it out again.
Thanks to everybody for the heads up.
Why oh why oh God are we back to the days of campaigning for birth control in the let 19th and early 20th centuries and incurring the same resistance?
one possible idea as to why: theocracy. Just like the one that killed women in New England 200 year or more ago on religious grounds just so their property could revert to the people who did the killing.
1I cannot stand this……once again, one of the results of Koch Bros pumping $$$ into states to elect tea party/religious men, usually…….check out Pence’s record here in IN…..a perfect example of no separation of church and state. It is heinous use of power.
2Yep. Women’s lives matter.
To their husbands [who are men] and their children [49.7% of whom are boys.]
I see a pattern here.
3This is one damn ugly statistical report! Not only are the people responsible for this mess stupid, but they are also responsible for these deaths/murders IMHO.
4Cut funding for preventive healthcare.
Health problems/deaths increase.
They’re right. I can’t see a connection either.
(Sarcasm. Really awful sarcasm.)
5Now! Now! Be nice! Yo can’t expect a bunch of brain dead rePUKEian moroons to use a brain that is dead! And when you consider most people hate politicians smarter then they are, you realize the vast numbers of brain dead you have.
6If these criminals are permitted to have governmental power their death toll will eventually exceed that of Mao and the Nazis, throw in Pol Pot too.
You think not?
7Think of issues like this, absolute numbers are low, but their handling of the Zika virus (and all the others, past and future), the environment, economy, etc., will eventually involve millions; portending intentional disasters. Then ponder a Donald with the nuke controls…
Hey, they’re just women. It’s not as if they’re human. And their lives are certainly less important than the high horse a bunch of damn Republicans are riding.
Rubbing a dog’s nose in his poop is not supposed to be an effective method of training, but I’d like to try it here just in case.
I wish some good lawyer would take up a class action suit on behalf of those dead and injured women and children and their families.
Hey, wait a sec– if a pregnant woman dies, so does her unborn. WHAT ABOUT THE BAYBEEES????
8JJ, in the third paragraph I think you mean “mortality” and not “morality.”
9Yeah, but you forgot to include the adjective “poor” to that increase. So, no problem…
10Another blatant example that women are considered second class citizens, peripheral damage. These statistics should enrage every man, woman and child in this country. Add to it the lack of care available to the very poor due to the non-expansion of Medicaid. Texas Rethuglicans should be denied any type of healthcare at all.
11So sad that women had to die to make some “christian” feel better.
12I know I’ve said it here before but it’s worth repeating. As my lady’s late mother (who was a nurse) used to say, these people’s concern for life begins at conception and ends at birth. Repugnant.
13Cutting funds means the right wingers can pass the $$ on to their cohorts in crime…this time to an ‘organization’ that is only a phone number & a one page web site.
Headline today: Texas awards $1.6M health grant to woman fearful she can get HIV from fetuses flushed into sewers”
Carol Everett. founder and CEO of The Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization that gives women health “advice,” but is not a medical provider and can’t perform any health care services http://tinyurl.com/hzamjlx
14You use your soapbox well, please continue to do so.
15This report made me angry enough to pull the article and read the entire thing, including the complicated methodology they had to use to get comparable data across all states.
In their discussion of TX results, they say, “There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics. Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely.” So TX policies were associated with a change in the ballpark of what you’d see in war or natural disaster.
For contrast, consider my home state of California: “California, however, showed a marked decline in maternal and late maternal mortality from 2003 to 2014. California has made concerted efforts to reduce maternal mortality, including initiating a statewide pregnancy-associated mortality review in 2006 and contracting with the California Maternal Quality Care
Collaborative to investigate primary causes of maternal death. This collaborative developed and promulgated evidence-based tool kits to address two of the most common, preventable contributors to maternal
death (obstetric hemorrhage and preeclampsia) and implemented quality improvement initiatives throughout the state. These efforts appear to have helped reduce maternal mortality in California.
So the authors are willing to give health policy changes credit for the improvement observed in CA, but hesitant to blame TX policy idiocy for its maternal health disaster. I, however, am quite happy to go there: Texas policies are killing women.
16Link to topic story, lest, having asserted facts without providing referential links, anyone equates this post to Breitbart or something in Crazy Uncle Teabagger’s Inbox:
http://kut.org/post/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-doubled-two-years-researchers-don-t-know-why
17Sleeve98 – I apologize. I am generally very careful to provide links to the source material. I guess I just got too upset about the article, plus today is deadline day for one of my paying jobs so I’m kinda crazy. Thank you for the link. That’s certainly the one I used.
18Message to the Forced Birthers: don’t like birth control, then don’t use it. Don’t like abortion, then don’t have one. Your problem is solved. Now you can kindly butt out and allow others to solve their own problems.
19PKM, the problem with the “Don’t like abortion, don’t have one” argument is that the word “abortion” can be replaced with “slaves.” Not that I agree with that tactic, but it’s the right’s knee-jerk reply.
It should be harder for them to argue for a policy that’s contributing to the death of women AND the unborn. To some of them, the women– including married women with several children already– are just evil sluts who want abortions, or else “victims” of their own decisions.
20Speaking of letting others solve their own problems, I wanted to slap Rubio for saying that pregnant women who contract Zika should be denied abortions. If he wants to take over and pay for lifelong care of a microcephalic child, considering that child’s impact on the family economically, emotionally, and in terms of the workload, then he *may* have some say– not otherwise.
21The authors have observed a mathematical anomoly ( a steep jump in mortality in a defined population, e.g, Texas women of child bearing age).
Believing that the changes in TX health policy is responsible for this change is not quite the same as putting that hypothesis through the scientific method and reaching the same conclusion with data to support it.
The authors appear to be moving toward an investigation and one hopes they will assemble and execute a rigorous and robust study linking TX health policy changes to the changes in mortality. I hope they also expand the study to probe any changes in morbidity associated with the policy changes.
This all assumes that (1) the investigators will be funded to do that study (see lack of funding for correlational studies between gun policy and gun related mortality/morbidity) and (2) that solid data based conclusions will alter anyone’s mind in today’s world.
22Note; in the first paragraph you say the mother “morality” rate doubled. Please change to “mortality”. Just a typo I know but it really changes the meaning!
23You know I love ya, lady. I considered poking you with a much pointier spear but the notion that you might be run ragged today actually did occur to me.
And more kudos for the Ballots work last week. Whatever you’re doing, it’s making the world a better place, so DON’T STOP.
24re: “…state legislators decided that their religion was more important than women’s deaths”— au contraire mon ami, Juanita Jean, herownself.
25It is not their religion which was more important, ’twas their politics, perhaps cloaked as their religion, but still their politics.
These right wingers will say anything they need to control votes.
Not their religion, their politics.
Rhea, points to you on forestalling snacilbupeR “logic.” Extra points for your smack down on Rubio’s numb nuts Zika stance. I’m not nearly as nice as you to any of the snacilbupeR who would argue back with their slavery false equivalency. When they whine about my verbal bombast, I casually explain that it’s the pleasant alternative for them to my choking the st00pid out of them. SMDH that they have the audacity to argue “favorably” for slavery and expect that argument to carry any weight toward enslaving women with their forced birther bull nonsense.
We need a trap, spay or neuter, and release program for snacilbupeR. Although, I am not so sure about the release part.
26Yep, Mel, as a scientist/ medical researcher I’m happy to insist on further study before inferring causality, and I very much hope it gets funded. The usual epidemiology criteria for evidence in observational studies should be applied (see Bradford Hill, for example).
It strikes me as somewhat curious, though, that the authors are perfectly willing to give CA credit for reducing the mortality rate while not putting TX on notice to explain their “anomaly” in some way other than change in policies. It’s far too large to be mere noise in the system. And I think they did a pretty good job of controlling for different systems of reporting, at least from what I can tell from the methods section.
Funding of research on maternal mortality is still, thank goodness, not banned by the Forces of Snacilbuper Darkness. And there’s starting to be some daylight on funding in firearm violence prevention research – CA is funding a center at one of the UC’s (very possibly my own), and there are other sources out there now.
Personally? I think it’s pretty hard to come up with any other explanation except cutting maternal healthcare. The only other plausible ones to me would be changes in data collection, or some sort of data error.
27Arrrggghhhhh. It is one of those days! I’m now headed into Houston to help one of my favorite Democrats but I will try to fix it. Thank you, Lisa.
28Please, please someone tell, no YELL at the incredably stupid, women hating so called Christian men. They are back in the 16th century. Women deserve good health care as a right. Hey stupid male politicians! Are not women promised “life, liberty, etc”? And life includes health care for a long healthy one. Not having one’s health care facility closed by ignorant, narrow minded politicians trying to score points with equally narrow minded bible thumpers. And all of this is completely contrary to the First Amendment. Which guarantees freedom FROM religion. Tell the bible thumpers to STOP TRYING TO PUSH THEIR BELIEFS ON OTHERS!
29Thanks, PKM, for your Message to Forced Birthers. It’s simple, easy to understand, and fair.
30Of course we don’t have enough money for health matters when we have to pay for “Jesus shots” and rodeo entry fees for our agricultural commissioner, along with many other special expenditures of which we know nothing yet.
Our right-to-life state legislators decided that their religion was more more important than women’s deaths. Period.
This needs to be made into a bumper sticker. I live In a very awesome part of SW Florida. Check out Charlotte Harbor sometime.
It’s for some reason totally rebublican and thw State is run from the same kind of morons that Texas has, I know I used to live in Oklahoma, Tulsa Countyy Creek Indians originally started the city. To my everlasting shame as an olds I actually voted for Jim Inhofr for Mayor of Tulsa.
Sorry
31But our benevolent rethuglican legislature is all about saving the Fetus! Guess they failed to realize Momma’s health is an important part of the equation!
32@Laurel: I suspect that the authors are senior enough to figure out that any future political threats to extended studies might flow out of the right wing cretins in the national legislature if they were alerted. The threat would not come out of the CA congressional delegation.
Speculating on the positive outcome due to CA policies might be safer than doing the same speculation with regard to the TX policy changes and the rather stark outcomes observed here in TX. Generally, no matter how well phrased or deserved, pointing out to people that they are beyond stupid and have really cost people lives doesn’t really get a thoughtful, non-emotional response.
I really do hope that CA can provide enough funding to start studies that will force scientific investigations into the correlation between gun policy and outcomes. And that these studies lead to more and larger studies that support and define the linkage between gun policy and human cost.
Your speculation that the current findings may be potentially affected by the data collection process is interesting. However, I think that may be why the authors chose the end point of mortality. That is a signal without any ambiguity (such as ill defined morbidity criteria). I suppose one could speculate that the TX data collection process was somehow more accurate than CA process (or the rest of the nation’s processes) but that could be easily tested/examined. The signal is just too stark in my opinion and cannot be explained by any small differences in data acquisition or processing.
33Up thread, someone used the two most important words in this discussion:
34Evidence based.
Religions are all very nice in their way and when properly applied can make people behave more kindly to one another and even cause positive outcomes, but they are not evidence based. Ever. Faith is not science.
When the Texas Legislature pulls its collective head out of its collective a$$ and starts making laws and promoting policies that are evidence based, we will see change. But first we will have to elect people to office who are not Republicans!
This is truly appalling. We really need to get out the vote.
35Wasn’t it Rick Perry who was oh, so concerned about the “health of the mother” when he closed all those clinics that didn’t measure up to full hospital rankings? It was “for their own good,” remember? Yep – the width of the hallways and the number of janitorial closets were SO important!
Yeah, well, the glasses didn’t make him any smarter, either.
36Okay, I do have a firearm which I am adept at using. Someone just point me to Austin at the right time of year.
[No, Vladdy Pukin, this is Not a Real Threat. I’m not going anywhere. But those SOBs who are letting women die ought to suffer a similar fate.]
37Rhea, in answer to your question….if a pregnant woman dies in Texas, they put her on life support. Witness Mrs. Munoz. a.k.a. zombie mommy, from Dallas. They kept her dead body on life support for months to save the “life” of a moribund fetus against the husband’s wishes. Toward the end, Munoz’s body was deteriorating, and when her mother held her hand, a finger fell off. None the less the unrighteous right’s first thought seem to be * that B—-h might be dead but she’s still gonna have that kid.”
38Maternal death rates for US have increased as in rest of world they have declined. Forget if that was from WHO or CDC. All,of above. . “
39Kate, that’s just sickening and really sick. Bunch of farking monsters.
40