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I just found $100 Million [1]

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Date: 2022-07-02

If you're worried about gas prices, wait until you see how much it costs for women to fly to another state to have an abortion

$100 Million Dollars. That’s what Texas taxpayers are paying for a bogus small program that persuades women not to have abortions. Link to the article below, but here’s the Readers Digest version:

Sixteen years ago, Texas lawmakers created a small program with a big goal: persuading women not to have abortions. It was given a few million in federal anti-poverty dollars and saw fewer than a dozen people its first year.

Since then, it’s ballooned. Alternatives to Abortion is poised to cost taxpayers $100 million over the next biennium — a twentyfold budget increase — and “served” more than 100,000 pregnant women and parents last year.

But the Legislature has required little information about what the program has accomplished. MSNBC covered this story today to show how it’s a bogus program. It’s designed to shame women into having forced births without providing meaningful assistance to those who fall victims to this scam.

In 2017, they gave it $20 million from an air quality program. In 2021, they sent it another $20 million from a health technology budget.

When other programs lost state money in 2011, Alternatives to Abortion was spared. “The state prioritized the availability of Pro-Life alternatives,” 80 lawmakers wrote in a 2019 letter.

Of a dozen states that could be identified with comparable programs, Texas’ has had by far the biggest budget in recent years.

Contractors for this program refer people to assistance programs they may be eligible for, like Medicaid or food stamps. State data provided to the Texas Tribune show less than a third of those 218,000 referrals last year led to someone actually signing up or being waitlisted for an assistance problem.

The Texas Pregnancy Care Network said this program deceptively advertised itself as a medical facility that might perform abortions and targeted ads to internet users who searched Google for “abortion clinics.”

Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/08/texas-abortion-budget/

Oh, yeah…Greg Abbott is an asshole, and so is Ted Cruz.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/2/2108025/--100-Million-Dollars-Wasted

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