I was reading the Huffington Post today and came across some interesting information that I thought pertained to this class. It was about the aftermath of a decisions made my conservative Texas legislators to cut the funding of family planning clinics by two-thirds. I was first off shocked by the decisions to cut that much funding. I truly blows my mind when government officials and political figures decide that family planning and assistance is something worth taking out of our budget. What didn’t surprise me however, was that the first demographic that was negatively effected by this was women. This particular budget cut wasn’t just taking away families’ abilities to get services and plan their futures in a constructive way, but it took away major health assistance for women (i.e. contraceptives, pap smears, cancer treatments, etc.) It then described in the article how Latina women living in the Rio Grande Valley were effected. What initially broke my heart for these women was that the original goal of this budget cut was to ensure that the efforts of Planned Parenthood were stifled. But, as this typically turns out, when you take away the access for women to properly understand and take care of their own bodies, then women’s bodies are the first ones to be negatively influenced. So much in this particular case, that it has been determined as an infringement on these women’s humans rights. They no longer have access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases, for basic checkups regarding their health, abortions etc. Without these forms of assistance these women are not only susceptible to becoming extremely ill, but are also now exposed to unexpected pregnancy and other issues relating to their sexual health that could deeply effect heir lives. This made me think about the homeless mothers in book that I read for our last assignment. Im sure those women could have had the information and assistance to make better choices regarding their sexual wellbeing and physical health had they had the information of how to be safe and how to advocate for themselves. It also connects to the book that I am reading now that deals specifically with policies. Without these resources that were taken away in the budget cuts, there has been a drastic reduction in condom use, women re having to chose between getting check ups and feeding there family, etc. These are choices that people shouldn’t have to make and are inevitably the ones that can send force a person into homelessness. What I mean by this is that if a mother falls sick because she couldn’t get a checkup on time, she cannot work and then her family can lose their income. If a mother has an unexpected pregnancy and she cannot afford to take care of another child, that could also lead to homelessness. There are plenty of ways in which taking the rights that women have to education, protection and care of their bodies can effect their overall quality of life. I was heartbroken by stories in the article and was exceedingly sad for these women. However, I was happy to see that there are still come women who are meeting up with one another to discuss their reproductive rights. I think that the empowerment that these women are still seeking to provide themselves and each other with is proof of how resilient women are, however I don’t think that they should be forced into providing it for themselves, or forced into thinking that they are the only ones that care about their reproductive rights. Women should be a priority of our society and yet we remain a particularly undervalued group in most of the world. In the same way that we have been discussing that to understand homelessness is to help end homelessness, to understand the reality of these women’s lives and what they need is to help end the oppression that they are facing on a day to day basis They do not deserve to have their rights taken away from them in regards to their knowledge of their bodies and the rights provided for their bodies. More or less what I meant to say through this post was that I am now starting to see that ways in which people need to start thinking more about one another. We need to think about the homeless, we need to think about impoverished and under supported women, etc. We just need to keep each other in mind when we make drastic policy and funding cuts and we need to think about who is truly going to be affected and to what degrees.

post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/26/nuestro-texas-rio-grande-valley-report_n_4849754.html