A Texas affiliate of Planned Parenthood will close four centers in south Texas thanks to the bill pro-life Gov. Rick Perry signed revoking taxpayer funding for the nation’s biggest abortion business.
Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County announced over the weekend that will close four of its centers and lay off half of its staff in response to the cuts the state legislature approved, which state pro-life groups like Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life supported. The abortion business plans to shut down centers in Rio Grande City, San Carlos, Progreso and Mission.
The Planned Parenthood affiliate will consolidate its offices and refer existing customers to remaining centers in McAllen, Edinburg, San Juan and Weslaco.
While it claims the cuts will deny women access to some non-abortion health care Planned Parenthood also provides, thousands of other agencies and medical offices are located throughout the state that provide the same or better quality health care for women without the trappings of also destroying lives in abortions.
Isabel Mercado, the president of the agency’s volunteer board, told The Monitor newspaper that the number of staff the affiliate employees will drop from 67 to 32 after the cuts, which she claimed would have a “devastating effect” for women in the south Texas area. Although Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County does not do abortions, it refers women for them to places that do them.
“It is our women – those needing family planning and preventive health care – who are the victims of the drastic cuts to family planning,” she said.
Patricio Gonzales, the chief executive officer for the local Planned Parenthood office, told the newspaper that Planned Parenthood will provide fewer free non-abortion services and shift to requiring them to purchase those services, since 70 percent of the income for Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County came from government sources prior to the cuts the legislature made.
The closings come after another Planned Parenthood affiliate closed its abortion-referral facility in Sherman in the northern part of the state as a direct result of the bill Governor Rick Perry signed that the Texas legislature approved revoking taxpayer funding for the abortion business.
The center closed our months after former manager Ramona Trevino resigned her post at Planned Parenthood. Trevino is now speaking out about her pro-life conversion and resulting exodus from the organization responsible for the most abortions in the United States.
According to the pro-life group 40 Days for Life, which publicized the closing and which helped Abby Johnson leave a Bryan, Texas Planned Parenthood center, Trevino explains that, although this particular Planned Parenthood did not perform surgical abortions, she was struggling “with [her] conscience . . . on contraception, abortion and [her] role in it all.” All Planned Parenthood centers make abortion referrals and some of them dispense the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug that has killed dozens of women and injured another 2,200 in the United States alone.
Also last month, pro-life advocates were given the good news that an abortion center shut down in Pensacola, Florida.
The closing follows news last week that Planned Parenthood would no longer do abortions at some Arizona locations because it declined to follow new pro-life laws enacted in that state.
Meanwhile, a California-based abortion business closed in July after 40 Days for Life pro-life prayer events there.
Earlier this year, Family Planning Associates, one of the largest abortion center chains in California, closed the abortion business it runs in Newport Beach. Operation Rescue president Troy Newman informed LifeNews about the closing of the FPA abortion facility and he said the Newport Beach location is one “where pro-lifers have been sidewalk counseling and praying for decades” and “its closure is an encouragement that we are winning.”
With FPA closing up shop in Newport Beach, it joins the closing of all five Golden Gate Community Health locations in the San Francisco area. Formerly known as Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, the GGCH abortion centers closed after financial problems and mismanagement forced national Planned Parenthood officials to disaffiliate the local affiliate.
Also earlier this year, two Pennsylvania abortion clinics operated by abortionist Soleiman M. Soli were closed by state officials in the wake of the discovery of Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” where he killed a woman in a botched abortion and killed hundreds of babies in birth-induced abortions that are essentially infanticides. Soli closed the clinics and retired rather than clean them up.
The closings follow the permanent closure of a Planned Parenthood abortion referral center in Ohio. Planned Parenthood of Northeast Ohio will be closing one of its centers north of Columbus, in Galion, because it says it is has come up on financial difficulties that make it necessary to consolidate.
