Attacking science harmful to women’s health care
What do some politicians and special interests do when scientific evidence contradicts their political agendas? They attack the researchers.
First, tobacco companies attacked scientists who revealed the many health harms caused by smoking. Next, fossil fuel companies went after researchers who provided evidence that human use of carbon fuels is changing the climate. And now politicians are denouncing experts whose data expose the health consequences of limiting access to reproductive health care.
In 2013, Texas legislators cut funds for family planning clinics run by Planned Parenthood, but the federal government refused to allow them to limit choices for Medicaid patients. So Texas sidestepped this regulation by setting up its own statefunded family planning program without the Planned Parenthood clinics. Legislators asserted that women on Medicaid would still be able to get care.
However, researchers from the University of Texas and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission decided to look at contraceptive use and births to Medicaid patients in the years before and after the exclusion of Planned Parenthood. They found that in counties that had lost access to Planned Parenthood clinics, fewer women used long-acting birth control and more of these women got pregnant.
Instead of responding to this evidence by considering how to improve the situation, several Texas politicians criticized the study and condemned the researchers for revealing facts that contradicted their claims that the new program would provide care as well as Planned Parenthood had.
They were outraged that the two employed by the Health and Human Services Commission had functioned as true public servants — reviewing public data to evaluate the health impact of public policy. Threatened with punishment, one of those researchers has now retired.
In the cases of cigarettes and fossil fuel, the attacks on science are presumably motivated by a desire to keep making profits. What motivates the politicians who denounce scientific evidence about reproductive health? Clearly, many of them are opposed to abortion. The eyes of the nation are currently on Texas as the Supreme Court decides whether the state’s medically unnecessary requirements for abortion clinics create undue burdens for women seeking legal care.
However, defunding family planning clinics has nothing to do with abortion. In fact, it makes abortion more likely as the lack of contraception leads to unintended pregnancies. Could politicians be trying to increase births among poor women in Texas? They certainly have not enacted policies that would support poor mothers as Texas has a very low minimum wage, no paid family leave, no earned income or dependent care tax credits, and has rejected the Medicaid expansion offered by the Affordable Care Act.
It has long been difficult to be a poor mother in Texas. In 2002, I worked with a group of researchers, including from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, to assess how poor mothers of young children with asthma (or other chronic illnesses) fared under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’ new requirements that they work in order for their children to receive benefits. We found that these mothers faced rocks and hard places. If they took their children for needed medical care, they missed work and then lost their jobs and benefits. If they did not take their children to the doctor in order to attend work, their children missed medical appointments and got sicker. In this case, the data showed that it was structurally impossible for mothers of sick children to comply with both the work requirements and the health care needs of their children. This could have led to redesigning the program.
Americans hold a wide range of opinions about regulating industries, poverty and reproductive decisions and services. So let’s argue straightforwardly about our political disagreements rather than cover up the science and evidence that could inform these debates.
It is the responsibility of public employees to scrutinize public data to inform public policy. In Texas, the scientists who did so got hurt. And the poor women of Texas were hurt, too.