When Texas Republicans succeeded in defunding Planned Parenthood by cutting the women’s health group and other “affiliates of abortion providers” out of the Women’s Health Program, doctors and advocates warned that this would hurt health care for low-income women in the state. Without Planned Parenthood clinics in the Medicaid-funded health program, providers will have to take up to five times the number of patients they currently serve. More than 100,000 women will lose their access to preventive health care.

So far, at least 50 health clinics unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood have been forced to close. Now, Carla Hovela of Planned Parenthood of West Texas said the budget cuts are forcing another Planned Parenthood clinic to close in Abilene, Texas:

Holeva said having to close the Abilene facility is the result of cuts to a women’s health care program by Gov. Rick Perry.

Approximately 160,000 women across Texas have relied on the program’s funding, including about 1,500 annually at the Abilene center, Holeva said, noting the program provided pap smears, breast exams and birth control for participants.

“It (the program) has absolutely no connection to abortion,” Holeva said.

One day a month for the past few years, the clinic has provided medication abortions, but the practice was stopped last week. Women who seek abortion care or services like pap smears or STD testing will have to travel elsewhere. The clinic’s patient records will be transferred to Planned Parenthood West Texas’s San Angelo Health Center, which is almost 100 miles away.

HENDERSON, Nevada — Last week, Mitt Romney justified his desire to repeal Obamacare by arguing that “we don’t have people who die because they don’t have insurance.” And so on Monday, ThinkProgress spoke with Tea Party freshman Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV), a former emergency medicine doctor, at a candidate forum and asked him whether Romney’s comments jibe with his past experience. Heck took issue with Romney’s assertion that emergency room care for individuals without health insurance is a real solution. “I’ve seen people presented later in the course of their disease because they didn’t health insurance,” Heck said. At that point, “it’s certainly much more difficult for them and it’s much more costly to the system”:

KEYES: You’re a doctor. Mitt Romney took a little heat the other day for saying that there aren’t any folks in the United States who have died because they don’t have health insurance. Is that something you agree with in your experience? What have you seen personally?

HECK: I’ve seen people presented later in the course of their disease because they didn’t health insurance. So they put off getting help until they’re far along and then it’s certainly much more difficult for them and it’s much more costly to the system.

Heck’s two-fold point — that individuals without health insurance put off getting care, and that delayed treatment in the hospital or elsewhere ends up costing everyone more — is one of the overarching reasons why lawmakers passed Obamacare. In addition to the 45,000 Americans who die every year — one person every 12 minutes — because they don’t have insurance, 50 million Americans are unable to receive proper care because they lack coverage.

When they visit the emergency room, as Romney touted, for care that could have been prevented or better handled elsewhere, such as an asthma attack, those costs are passed on to everyone else through higher premiums.

On MSNBC Wednesday, Kerry Healey, Mitt Romney’s Lieutenant Governor and a current surrogate for his campaign, called contraception a “peripheral” issue, and referred to women being denied contraception coverage because of religious objections a “hypothetical.”

Instead, she said, the focus of the campaign should be on the economy, because that’s “what women care about.” When pressed by host Andrea Mitchell on whether contraception is a “pocketbook issue,” Healey refused to say whether Romney supported employers’ right to deny their employees contraception coverage on religious grounds:

HEALEY: These are the issues we should be talking about. The question of whether or not we should force someone to give up their religious freedom to provide insurance coverage in some hypothetical situation, is not really the point most, and women out there — there are 5.5 million unemployed women in the country. Did we have a discussion last night? Did President Obama put out his plan about how to get those women back in the workforce last night? He did not. He has an empty binder when it comes to proposals about women in America.

MITCHELL: With all due respect, is it not a pocketbook issue for millions of women who depend on their insurance, their medical insurance that they get at work? If their employer says I have a moral or religious objective then they do not have access to contraceptives as Mitt Romney said last night they should have. That is a pocketbook issue. It’s dollars and cents. [...]

HEALEY: He made it clear that he believes in enforcing religious freedom in this regard but he also strongly supports women’s access to contraception and any effort to say he doesn’t –

MITCHELL: If they can pay for it on their own. If the women can pay for it on their own, if they have the means.

HEALEY: The problem here is that we are talking about these peripheral issues. We need to really be talking about employment, jobs, that’s what women care about.

Watch it:

Contraception, of course, is a critical economic issue for the many women who struggle to afford their birth control costs, as well as the women who struggle even more to support the children that result from unintended pregnancies. One in three women has reported struggling to pay for birth control at some point in their lives — and Mitt Romney’s policies would make it significantly harder for women, especially lower income women, to have easy access to affordable contraception that allows them to put off having children they cannot afford.

Healey’s comments echo those of Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, who refused to comment on the topic of contraception, pivoting again and again back to the economy without connecting the two issues.

Overnight, a new advertisement for Mitt Romney popped up online unannounced, claiming that “Romney doesn’t oppose contraception at all. In fact, he thinks abortion should be an option in cases of rape, incest, or to save a mother’s life.”

Watch it:

The new ad is an overt attempt to frame the candidate as a moderate on women’s issues, as the Romney campaign has been attempting to do for the past week. But it covers up at least five of Romney’s most extreme positions on these issues — ones that any voter casting their ballot this election season deserves to know:

1) Romney supported the Blunt amendment. The Blunt Amendment would allow employers to deny contraception to their female employees because of religious objections. That means any woman working for an employer who didn’t support contraception would be denied the right to have her birth control costs covered. When asked if he supported the amendment, Romney said, “Of course.”

2) Romney wants to defund Planned Parenthood. Seventy six percent of the patients who go to Planned Parenthood are seeking affordable contraception options. Low-income women, particularly, rely on the organization to get family planning options that might otherwise be out of their price range. Because the organization uses a sliding scale pay system (PDF), it allows the poorest women to get the most affordable care.

3) Romney would restore co-pays for birth control. By repealing the Affordable Care Act, Romney would get rid of the requirement that insurance companies offer women a variety of birth control options without a co-pay attached. That makes it harder for women to get contraception, especially the most effective kinds, which tend to have the highest up-front costs.

4) Romney supports a ‘personhood amendment.’ Romney once told reporters that be would “absolutely” support a state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg as a person. Had it passed, that law would have outlawed some forms of contraception — as well as all abortions and in vitro fertilization.

5) Romney promised to reinstate the “global gag rule.” Romney could cut off family planning services that the United States currently offers to women abroad by using an executive order to reinstate the “global gag rule,” denying funding for any international organization that discusses abortion or provides abortion referrals for their clients. In an op-ed, he promised to do just that.

Last night’s presidential debate marked the second time that President Obama and Mitt Romney faced off against each other, but the first time that the topics covered focused on issues that pertain to women, who did not get a single mention in the first debate in Denver. Obama has traditionally led female voters, particularly on his policies on contraception and abortion. Last night’s debate seemed to follow that pattern, as Romney made several blunders that served to alienate himself from women and women’s issues:

1) Refusing to speak out in support of equal pay for women. When directly asked a question about pay equity from a member of the audience, Romney dodged the question — just like his campaign has avoided clarifying whether Romney supports specific pieces of legislation like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act or the Paycheck Fairness Act that would address the fact that the average woman in the United States makes just 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. “If Romney was truly concerned about women in this economy, he’d take a stand against paycheck discrimination. Instead, he has remained silent and refused to speak out for equal pay for women and their families,” Lilly Ledbetter herself said in a statement released after the debate.

2) Falsely claiming he initiated a study to seek “binders full of women” to fill leadership roles in his administration as the governor of Massachusetts. Instead of addressing where he stands on pay equity, Romney responded to the question about closing the pay gap by pointing to the “concerted effort” that he made as governor to seek and hire qualified women for positions in his cabinet, claiming he asked women’s groups to bring him “binders full of women” to help recruit them. Aside from inspiring the biggest meme to come out of last night’s debate, Romney’s story about the binders simply isn’t true. In fact, a bipartisan women’s group formed in 2002 to address the lack of women in government, and compiled research on qualified women for potential cabinet positions before Romney was even elected. They did eventually present Romney with the aforementioned binders, but not because he asked for them.

3) Obscuring his position on providing women with access to contraception. Romney retorted to critiques of his record of women’s health by asserting, “I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.” That is a stark difference from Romney’s stated support for anti-contraception policies — such as his pledge to repeal Obamacare’s birth control mandate on his first day in office and his support for restrictive legislation like the Blunt Amendment, which would allow employers to deny coverage for birth control for any reason — as well as his intention to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides critical health services like contraception to millions of women. Nonetheless, Romney’s campaign has been especially busy with attempts to obscure his far-right record on women’s health over the past week.

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