After an uproar on Twitter, Cosmopolitan deleted a tweet Friday lamenting an increase of babies born in Texas. But the women’s magazine kept the tweet’s accompanying article up – and it’s just as bad.
Complete with a sad-face emoji, the Cosmo tweet Thursday read: “Texas women are having more babies since Planned Parenthood was defunded.”
The tweet linked to a story by editor Hannah Smothers. About three years ago, Smothers reported, Texas defunded Planned Parenthood by refusing to fund organizations that perform abortions.
Because of that, she argued, a study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at UT Austin and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found “a significant decrease in the number of women who filed claims for long-acting reversible contraceptives.”
And, more importantly, she stressed, the study also discovered a 1.9 percent “increase in the birthing rate in counties that once had state-funded Planned Parenthood clinics during that same time period of 2011 to 2014.”
Smothers tried to explain the predicament:
If there were any remaining doubts about how cutting Planned Parenthood funding affects women, those should be pretty much cleared up by this new data. When Texas removed Planned Parenthood from its state Medicaid family-planning program, low-income women who qualified for the program were no longer able to afford some of the most highly effective contraception options. And the subsequent consequence was an uptick in the birthrate.
“What's happening in Texas is a preview of what happens when you take away health care from women,” she warned. “The effects would only be felt harder if you took health care away on a national scale.”
“The effects” being “babies.”
Cosmo has a history of celebrating abortion – and Planned Parenthood. Last year, Cosmo offered Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, a platform to discuss how she wanted to “make” pro-life candidates “unacceptable.” (Cosmo is also a big fan of NARAL president Ilyse Hogue).
For the magazine’s cooperation, Planned Parenthood has awarded Cosmo and its writers four different times during its annual Maggie Awards ceremony.
Last year, Dr. Alveda C. King, the pro-life niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., went so far as to accuse Cosmo of “lining the pockets” of the abortion industry.
