Graphic by proud Texan Destiny De La Rosa of New Wave Feminists.

I am so proud of my home state right now that I feel like the Texas tattoo on my forearm should be glowing or casting a celebratory beacon into the sky like the Bat-Signal. Something. You see, as of yesterday, Texas finally, officially, kicked abortion to the curb.

On Thursday, Planned Parenthood was refused another hearing in the Texas funding battle, effectively ending their crusade in the Lone Star State. Here’s Governor Rick Perry, via CNN:

Today’s ruling affirms yet again that in Texas the Women’s Health Program has no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or promote abortion. In Texas we choose life, and we will immediately begin defunding all abortion affiliates to honor and uphold that choice.

We keep hearing from abortion advocates that defunding abortion providers harms women, that we are so stubborn and dogmatic that we are willing to deny women life-saving health care – cancer screenings, gynecological exams, mammograms, essential “family planning”! – just because we are weirdly fixated on abortion. Last year, “The Daily Show” discussed (read: ridiculed) the U.S. House of Representative’s vote to defund Planned Parenthood with a graphic bearing the words: “MOTHERF@#KERS.”

In other words, puritanical zealots were putting women – indeed, mothers! – at risk with their single-minded anti-abortion obsession.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Planned Parenthood offers lots and lots of helpful services besides abortion. They don’t, but let’s just pretend for a minute that they do. Would we then be justified in continuing to fund them, knowing we were offsetting the costs of providing abortions to women?

Let’s say that I am a super-awesome person. (Let’s just say.) Pretend I volunteer at a battered women’s shelter three days a week, drive nursing home residents to their cataract appointments, read to disabled kids on the weekends, put coins in other people’s parking meters, wash my hands five times a day for at least 45 seconds, and always greet everyone with a kindly smile. Then let’s say that every five years, on October 25, I stalk and murder a stranger. Should I be allowed to remain free? I mean, sure, I’m a murderer, but I do so much good, too!

Let’s look at this another way: say there’s a health care facility for women that provides mammograms (real ones, not the imaginary ones you get from Planned Parenthood), STD testing, prenatal care (available only at 8% of Planned Parenthood clinics), Pap smears, cancer screenings. All of that. But they do not provide abortions or hormonal birth control, and they counsel all patients against these things, teaching and encouraging abstinence to single women and Natural Family Planning to married women. Maybe they even – horror of horrors – share a religious faith with patients. Oh, heavens, no!

How do you think the anti-lifers would feel about that place? How loud would all the major media outlets scream about this condescending, patronizing, misleading clinic where women are not “informed about all their options”? (Go into a Planned Parenthood and ask them for adoption and abstinence counseling. Then we’ll talk about options.) Were this imaginary (and, um, awesome) clinic to receive state funding, I imagine we’d hear about it.

Texas is more than happy to fund women’s health care – not abortion. Abortion is not health care. Abortion does not diagnose, cure, or heal anything. It hurts – sometimes maims or even kills – women, and it kills unborn children. That’s all it does. You can argue ’til the cows come home about whether or not it is helpful or should be legal, but calling it “health care” is incorrect. Calling abortion health care is like calling the sadistic experiments of a Nazi doctor health care: an unnecessary operation, healing no one, leading to suffering and death.

The only difference is that the woman is often a willing participant, if you can call an often misled, desperate, or coerced participant willing.

Abortion advocates argue that women who have become pregnant in traumatic situations – through rape, incest, statutory rape, etc. – are somehow helped by having their pregnancy terminated, as though exposing them to yet another invasive, horrific act – yet another man opening their legs for a selfish reason, inflicting harm on her body and her child – is somehow therapeutic. Instead, as Live Action has discovered again and again, the abortion industry does little or nothing to protect women from sex-trafficking, statutory rape, and other abuses. To the contrary – they have been caught on camera protecting and instructing sex-traffickers and statutory rapists. In other words: criminals.

Yes, as Hugh Heffner has been proving for centuries, abortion is the sex trade’s best friend. Women are so much easier to use for pleasure and throw away when the embarrassing, revealing “products of conception” (we humans call them babies) can just be sucked out of them and discarded as medical waste.

Question: if abortion is the empowering, woman-friendly experience the fauxminists would have you believe, how come chauvinists, misogynists, rapists, and all-around jerks the world over love it so much? Does it make sense that something supported by Hef and Tucker Max would be good for women?

If pregnancy were a disease that needed “curing,” we could call abortion a cure. But pregnancy is not a disease, and abortion is not health care. Thus, it makes sense that Texas would refuse to fund it as part of the Women’s Health Program. In Texas, we believe that women deserve better than the violence and abuse of abortion, and so do their children.

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