I feel like it must be someone’s job somewhere to come up with stuff like this.
Right there with them
A group led by an anti-abortion advocate appears to be one of the largest recipients of state funding from the “Healthy Texas Women” program, which lawmakers recently created to help women find health care services paid for by the state.
The Heidi Group, a Round Rock-based center that has promoted alternatives to abortion to low-income women, is set to receive $1.6 million from the women’s health program, according to the comptroller’s office. That makes it the second-highest grant recipient on the current list, behind the Harris County public health department, which will receive $1.7 million.
[…]
The Heidi Group “will now be providing women’s health and family planning services required by Healthy Texas Women, including birth control, STI screening and treatment, plus cancer screenings to women across Texas,” state agency spokesman Bryan Black said in an email.
Black said the group had already recruited doctors to begin establishing family planning clinics across the state. He also said the women’s health program’s contracts were not final and that there were “more to come.” The program offers $18 million each year.
Abortion-rights supporters lambasted the Heidi Group’s contract.
“It’s very inappropriate that the state would contract with an organization that has never performed the services required by the contract,” said Heather Busby, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, in a statement. “The Heidi Group is an anti-abortion organization; it is not a healthcare provider.”
This is a political advocacy group that has been given a contract to provide health care. What could possibly go wrong with that? The Observer gives another reason to be concerned:
[Heidi Group founder Carol] Everett made headlines in early August following her testimony at a Texas Department of State Health Services meeting on new rules about fetal tissue disposal in Texas. There, she asserted that currently allowable means of fetal tissue disposal could result in HIV and other sexually transmitted infections being released into public water supplies, which she later repeated to an Austin Fox affiliate. Her concerns are not echoed by any major medical or public health groups.
So this is like hiring Jenny McCarthy to run your immunization program. This is what the state of Texas under Greg Abbott thinks about women’s healthcare. The Press, which has a more sympathetic portrait of Everett, and the Current, which is harsher, have more.
Is there a “Healthy Texas Men” program also being funded by the taxpayers? I’m just asking, because I believe men and women are equal and should be treated equally.
sad state of affairs…
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