The 85th Legislature shows yet again that Texas lacks statesmen and women.

Even as attacks on women’s health services put them at risk, today we honor mothers.

We take this day to honor our mothers. Maybe by serving them breakfast in bed. Maybe by showering them with candy or flowers — carnations are customary. It’s the day we say thank you for all they do, for loving us in spite of our shortcomings, pushing us to be decent human beings, and very often sacrificing their own desires to help us reach our goals in life.

So today we celebrate all the mothers whose children are safe and who probably made quite a mess cooking up that breakfast. But in the spirit of the woman who inspired this holiday, we also honor the mothers who struggle to hold their families together and to get their children to adulthood in good health, with adequate skills to earn a living, and free of the trauma of violence.

Mother’s Day was advocated by Anna Jarvis to honor the work her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had done after the Civil War when she organized women’s work clubs to help the mothers of Appalachia lower infant mortality by safeguarding their children from disease and milk contamination, a common problem of the era. Unfortunately for Texas mothers, safeguarding their children has had a very difficult year.

We honor those mothers who have had to overcome frightful impediments to health care for themselves and their kids. Mothers whose babies came into the world too early and too small, whose tiny size put them at risk for lifelong health problems. Mothers whose untreated pre-existing conditions may have been a contributing factor in their newborns’ low birth weight.

We honor the teen mothers, 22 percent of whom have more than one child during their teen years. Texas ranks third, behind New Mexico and Mississippi, in the number of teenage pregnancies, another preventable risk factor for low-birthweight babies.

The continued attacks on women’s health services in general and Planned Parenthood in particular put all of these mothers and their children at risk. By slashing an already inadequate Medicaid budget, millions of low-income women will lose access to health care and the long-acting birth control that is highly effective with teens. Planned Parenthood offers many well-woman services and is the largest single provider of contraception in the country. And no one knows what else will be lost if the U. S. Congress succeeds in passing the American Health Care Act. Coverage for pregnancy? Domestic violence? Sexual assault? Regular screenings for breast cancer and STDs and postpartum depression? What we do know is that the surest guarantee of safe, healthy children is a healthy mother.

We also honor those mothers who fight to get their children a decent education. Texas ranks 36th nationwide in per pupil spending, and funding actually declined for the 2016-2017 school year. Attempts to reform the state’s byzantine funding formula in this legislative session accomplished little. It is so woefully inadequate that last year the Texas Supreme Court served up a withering recommendation that it needed “transformational, top-tobottom reforms.”

The only reform efforts so far have centered on diverting scarce tax dollars from public schools to vouchers — despite the fact that a spate of recent studies have shown these programs have a negative impact on student performance — and the never-ending effort of Attorney General Ken Paxton to mandate where kids can go to the bathroom.

As the 85th legislative session comes to an end, the only substantive move on education was a bill that phases out the franchise tax on businesses (House Bill 28), which is a principal source of school funding. The Legislative Budget Board estimates losing it could result in education cuts of up to $3.5 billion in the 20202021 biennium. Genuine reform will be elusive until the Legislature summons the courage to tackle the inadequacy of local property taxes to finance our schools and the cumbersome Robin Hood redistribution scheme that will send $77.5 million of Houston’s property tax revenues to Austin.

Anna Jarvis spent her life trying to beat back the creeping commercialism of Mother’s Day and keep the focus on the crucial role mothers play in their children’s well-being. While we are not about to suggest giving up breakfast in bed or the ubiquitous heart-shaped box of chocolates, we do urge the Legislature to take this day to reconsider its biennial habit of balancing the state’s budget on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. So far this year lawmakers failed to move the needle on health care for low-income women and children, school funding, Child Protective Services, special education programs, quality pre-kindergarten, and early childhood intervention for special-needs children age 0-3, just to name a few. Anna Jarvis would be disappointed. And so would your mothers.