Evaluating the Impact of Abortion Restrictions and Drastic Budget Cuts for Family Planning in Texas

For reproductive health services, evaluation usually assesses the impact of a project seeking to increase service supply. However, as a result of recent legislative initiatives passed in Texas to curtail the availability of abortion through a two-thirds reduction in public funding for family planning, the subject of the evaluation described here is just the opposite—to assess the impact of measures intended to drastically reduce the supply of these services. We describe the 2011 Texas legislature’s initiatives, the key components of our comprehensive three-year evaluation that will attempt to assess the impact of this legislation on family planning and abortion services, unintended pregnancies, abortions and births, and highlight some of our initial findings. In the first of two waves of interviews with leaders of organizations that provided publicly funded reproductive health services, we found that 22% of the 240 clinics were closed after the funding cuts and an additional 16% of clinics reduced hours. Women in focus groups across Texas stated that it was difficult for them to pay newly instated fees for services, which exacerbated pre-exiting barriers to obtaining reproductive health care. We also review some of the main challenges we face in carrying out this evaluation.