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You want to walk alone down the street during the day? Better prepare yourself.

The other day, while I was at Kroger buying laundry detergent and frozen waffles, a man came up to me, leaned in close, and said, "Come on now, baby. Let's see a smile on that nice little face of yours." Before I could stop myself, before I could rebuke this man for violating my space, my privacy -- or even just flip him off -- my Texas manners took control, and I cracked a polite grin. Like some mannequin doll or trained circus animal, I unquestioningly obeyed this man and provided him with a plastic smile. He walked away, satisfied.

This week Hollaback!, a nonprofit that wants to end street harassment, issued a video in which one of their staffers took a 10 hour stroll through Manhattan and recorded how many times she was catcalled. She was winked at, verbally harassed and otherwise creepily approached more than 100 times.

Watching the video, it's tempting to dismiss the narrative as unique to New York. Dallas, after all, is an incredibly car-obsessed city. Dallas women are far less likely to walk an extended time down a busy city street than to drive. And as a Southern city, we are filled to the brim with chivalrous braggarts. Still, men in this city are just as guilty of catcalling women. And to that end, Dallas men are just as guilty of making Dallas women feel afraid.

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Right now, as this story is being written, four clinics provide abortions in Dallas: Abortion Advantage, Planned Parenthood, Routh Street Women's Clinic and Southwest Women's Surgery Center. Two, Whole Woman's Health and Planned Parenthood, are open in Fort Worth. But read quickly, because it's possible some of those will be closed by the time you finish.

OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much. The truth is that 40 years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, the state of abortion rights in Texas is more in flux than ever. Despite the fact that three local clinics were able to reopen thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, even in a big city like Dallas women have to navigate a maze to get a safe, legal procedure.

You can blame the TRAP for that.

TRAP -- "targeted restrictions of abortion providers" -- is a term used to describe laws like Texas' HB2, which required, among other things, clinics providing abortions to meet standards set for ambulatory surgical centers. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled that provision unconstitutional and stopped its enforcement. Texas appealed and the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided earlier this month to let Texas enforce the law until it made a final ruling on the case challenging the law.

Thirteen abortion clinics, including three in Dallas, closed briefly until the U.S. Supreme Court last week ordered Texas to hold off enforcement until the 5th Circuit rules.

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Texas State Archives

"Ma" Ferguson became Texas' first female governor after her husband was impeached.

Since the 2013 controversial passage of House Bill 2, which placed restrictions on abortion clinics and prompted the closing of more than half the clinics in the state, Texas has gained a reputation outside the state as one of the worst providers of women's health care the country.

See also:
It Really Sucks to Be a Kid in Texas
It Really Sucks to Be Mentally Ill in Texas
It Really Sucks to Be Old in Texas

It turns out, that's not the only area where Texas fails its women. A new study released by WalletHub measured gender equality across every state. The information compiled surveys in factors such as workplace environment, education, healthcare and political representation, then averaged the rankings in each area to determine each state's overall ranking.

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Gage Skidmore

It's been one year since Gov. Perry signed HB2, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country.

One year ago yesterday, Governor Rick Perry signed into law one of the country's most restrictive abortion laws. It's been a little over a year since Wendy's Davis' landmark filibuster, and it would be another few months before the bill withstood legal strutiny in federal courts. But here we are nonetheless, one year after the passage of the bill.

So where do we stand?

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Steenaire, via Flickr

Wendy Davis' 11th-hour filibuster in June 2013 didn't ultimately stop the Texas Legislature from passing some of the country's most sweeping abortion restrictions, nor did it stop abortion clinics across the state from shutting their doors when they couldn't meet the stringent new standards or obtain the newly required admitting privileges at local hospitals. It almost certainly didn't change anyone's mind on the issue itself.

What the filibuster did do, aside from laying the foundation for Davis' gubernatorial campaign, is breathe a new sense of possibility into Texas' grassroots reproductive-rights movement, which has been busy planting new seeds and attempting to keep the momentum alive.

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David Dewhurst: Can't bring himself to say "vaginas."

Nothing gets the cash flowing into a Texas Republican's re-election campaign quite like a plot by coastal liberal elites to turn Texas into a dystopian failed state that will probably be powered by aborted fetuses. So the fundraising email Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst sent on Wednesday urging supporters to "stand with me today and stop Hollywood from its destructive liberal behavior" by donating to his campaign was to be expected.

Dewhurst, though, isn't sounding a general alarm about the evils of California. His plea for cash is pegged to a very specific event, a comedy show scheduled for tonight in Los Angeles to raise money to fight Texas abortion restrictions.

"That's right, Hollywood believes so strongly in ending innocent life, that it's using jokes to raise money to fund abortions," Dewhurst writes. "It's disturbing that people who don't even reside in Texas feel the need to change our laws, and use comedy as a way to raise money for a medical procedure that can deeply harm the health of a woman, not to mention end an innocent life."

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Placing tough new rules on abortion clinics is just common sense, according to common sense fanatic Rick Perry. He says that House Bill 2--the new law requiring all abortions to be performed in surgical centers, by a doctor with admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles -- will ensure "that anyone performing abortions in Texas is doing so in a facility that is safe, clean and prepared to deal with any emergencies that might occur."

That's nice. But if we're really serious about putting safety first in Texas, then we haven't gone far enough. Here is an alarming list of popular outpatient procedures that can still be performed in a normal, non-surgical clinic, by a doctor who doesn't necessarily have hospital-admitting-privileges.

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When the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and more than a dozen health care providers took Attorney General Greg Abbott to court in September to challenge Texas' new anti-abortion law, they weren't trying to tackle the entire law. Instead, they narrowed in on a few key provisions that were supposed to take effect in October.

A key provision in the law, and one major focus of the lawsuit, is a requirement that all abortion providers must have admitting privileges at a local hospital, access that's difficult obtain if you're working at a small clinic in the middle of nowhere. According to Planned Parenthood, that provision would have forced one-third of abortion clinics in Texas to shut down. And yesterday the provision got a temporary go-ahead from a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court.

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The aftermath of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling last week reinstating the requirement that doctors performing abortions in Texas have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic was swift and sweeping. By the next morning, a third of the state's abortion clinics had closed or stopped performing the procedure.

That much was predictable. So was this morning's announcement by Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards.

"We're asking the Supreme Court to stop Texas' dangerous and extreme law from taking effect because your rights -- your very ability to make your own medical decisions -- should not depend on your ZIP code," she said in a news release.

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Most of Texas' sweeping anti-abortion law has already gone into effect. The ban on the procedure after 20 weeks post-fertilization, the requirement that clinics meet the standards laid out for ambulatory surgical center, the mandatory reliance on outdated FDA guidelines on abortion-inducing drugs--all scooted from Governor Perry's desk to reality unimpeded.

The story was different for the rule that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic. The day before the provision was set to go into effect, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel declared it an "undue burden" on Texas women and struck it down as unconstitutional.

Yeakel's permanent injunction lasted all of three days. Thursday evening, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the admitting-privileges requirement can go into effect immediately.

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