Half of TX Women Face Barriers to Reproductive Health

Alexa Ura for The Texas Tribune reports:

More than half of Texas women faced at least one barrier to accessing reproductive health care in the years after lawmakers dramatically altered the state’s family planning services, according to a new report by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.

The project’s researchers, who are based at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on access to reproductive services — including family planning, cervical cancer screenings and contraception — starting in 2011. That’s the year the Republican-led Legislature cut the state’s budget for family planning by two-thirds and rejected a federally financed women’s health program in favor of a state-run program.

Since then, lawmakers have worked to restore services, allocating millions of dollars to new programs focused on women’s health care. But the 2011 cuts led to the closure of 76 women’s health clinics statewide.