Sexual and Reproductive Health

To Battle Teen Pregnancy Crisis, Texas Builds $1.2 Million Abstinence-Only Website

You're a public health policymaker in Texas. Teenage girls in the state are getting knocked up at an alarming rate, then they're having babies and getting knocked up again. The data, along with the bulk of the scientific literature, suggest that the state's longstanding strategy of telling kids not ... More >>

Activists Ask Rick Perry to Reduce Abortions by Adding Sex Ed to Special Session

Per the rules of the Texas legislature's special session, Governor Rick Perry can add any agenda items that he thinks need to be addressed, with abortion taking a pretty comfortable lead over anything else. Otherwise, any bills the legislators file right now are in free-floating purgatory. In a sho ... More >>

HIV-Positive Man Charged with Aggravated Assault for Spitting on Police Officers

Anthony Duane Horne, 25, an HIV-positive man, was charged with aggravated assault for spitting on two Dallas police officers, The Dallas Morning News and Dallas Voice reported yesterday. According to police, when a Dallas County Hospital employee tried to put a spit mask on Horne, who was being book ... More >>

Sex Ed the Texas Way

Dallas wants to close the book on abstinence-only education. Texas keeps getting in the way.

Here Are All The Reasons Why Texas Teenagers Can't Seem to Stop Getting Pregnant

Congratulations, Texas! After a lot of hard work and many long nights, we're number one in the nation for repeat teen births. According to the Centers for Disease Control, which released a new report on April 2, in 2010, 22 percent of Texas teenagers aged 15-19 who gave birth were delivering their ... More >>

State Rep. Bill Zedler Wants to Shut Down Those Grody LGBT Centers at Texas Colleges

The LGBT Resource Center at Texas A&M University, like its cousins at the University of Texas and the University of Houston, is an innocuous arm of school bureaucracy that offers an array of resources to gay and transgendered students. There is a guest speaker program, a lending library, networking ... More >>

Feds Bypass State, Give $13 Million for Family Planning Directly to Women's Health Coalition

Maybe you're not a Yiddish speaker, but you need a handy illustration of the concept of "chutzpah." In Spanish: cojones. Or in English, if you insist: king-sized brass balls. If you need a real-world demonstration of this cross-cultural concept, you have only to look at how your state-level bureaucr ... More >>

Faced With Rising Teen STD Rates, County Health Officials Lobbying DISD to Jettison Abstinence-Based Sex Ed

Teenagers, volatile bundles of hormones that they are, are going to have sex. That's an iron law of nature, as unchangeable as the fact that lions like to eat zebras. It's also a fair bet that, unless they are taught otherwise, these teenagers are going to have sex in an completely unsafe and irresp ... More >>

Texas Freedom Network Poll: Most Texans Support Birth Control and Family Planning

Texas Freedom Network has a lot to be irritated about lately. TFN is a left-leaning advocacy group focusing on things like civil liberties, church-state separation and not wasting classroom hours teaching Texas schoolchildren that the Rapture is a rock-solid scientific inevitability. As you might ... More >>

Texas Reps. Say Planned Parenthood Recruits Schoolkids, Aim to End Its Sex Ed Effort

Texas parents beware: your children are being "imperiled" by "abortion peddlers" who want to teach them "sex education." No. No, they're not. Although at some point someone might want to teach them to put a condom on a banana, and conservative lawmakers, predictably, want to make damn sure that per ... More >>

Texas Now Serves Fewer Family Planning Patients and Spends More Money To Do It

In the last legislative session, Texas lawmakers cut the state's family planning budget by two-thirds, a loss of around $73.6 million over the next two years. The reason behind this, naturally, was that "family planning" is clearly a secret code word for "abortion." "Of course this is a war on bir ... More >>

Texas Will "Immediately" Defund Planned Parenthood After Court Refuses to Hear its Plea

That faint popping sound you heard last night was Governor Rick Perry uncorking a nice bottle of bubbly, after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday refused a request by Planned Parenthood to rehear the case over its ban from the new Texas Women's Health Program (TWHP). Texas, it appears ... More >>

New England Journal of Medicine Says Texas' Family Planning Cuts Are A Public Health Disaster

It's been nearly a year since Texas legislators slashed the state's family planning funding, diverting $73 million to a variety of other programs. That was about two-thirds of the total family planning budget, and the conservative lawmakers who orchestrated the cuts were vocal about why they'd done ... More >>

David France on the History and Survival of ACT UP

Appeals Court Says Planned Parenthood Can Be Banned From the Women's Health Program, Rick Perry Rejoices

Texas' game of women's health pingpong continues. A panel of judges from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction yesterday that had allowed Planned Parenthood to remain in the Medicaid Women's Health Program. In other words, PP is out. Again. The nonprofit was boote ... More >>

Is the Bush Institute's Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon Program Too Little Too Late?

At right you see former First Lady Laura Bush, cheerily painting a door at a health clinic in Zambia. The photo was taken earlier this month by a staffer at the Bush Institute, part of the press surrounding the former first couple's visit to Africa earlier this month. It's also included in today's D ... More >>

Bryan Rep. Bill Flores Wants To Revive Abstinence-Only Education Funding

All this arguing we're doing about contraception is getting a little tiresome, isn't it? Sure, we get to use the word "sluts" repeatedly in a national conversation, and we've watched several elderly male politicians state their understanding of how birth control works, explanations which often deser ... More >>

Rockwall Rep. Ralph Hall Would Really Rather That No One Pays For Your Contraception

If you've been hiding under an especially sturdy and soundproof rock for the past month, perhaps you missed out on the increasingly bitter national debate over contraception coverage. Lucky for you, U.S. Representative Ralph Hall has taken a break from doubting global warming and talking about how i ... More >>

One Man's (Somewhat Frantic and Almost Failed) Hunt for Emergency Contraceptive

One night late last year, Jason Melbourne walked into a CVS pharmacy in Mesquite, hoping against hope to walk out with an emergency contraceptive, or "the morning-after pill." It wasn't the morning after. He and his wife had their "accident" a few days before, and the 72-hour window in which EC is m ... More >>

Reflecting on 30 Years of AIDS

Survey Says Texas Schools Are Now a Little Less Awful at Teaching Students Sex Education

​Just three years ago, 94 percent of the state's school districts told their kiddos: Just say no to sex. And that was that when it came to sex ed -- abstinence only and nothing but, which was working out real well considering that Texas's teen-pregnancy rate was the third-highest in all the land. ... More >>

The Rising AIDS Epidemic Among Dallas's Young Poor People

Barbara Rios/Science Photo Library​The number of young people in Dallas contracting HIV and AIDS is increasing, KTVT-Channel 11 reported Monday, and those young people, ages 13 to 24, now make up 25 percent of all new diagnoses. And those stats were compiled before the state decided to gut fam ... More >>

Rent's Due

Proof Positive

Speak Out, Loud And Proud

Think America Coddles Mexicans? How About The Way The Entire World Coddles Americans?

Buzz: Sex Ed in Texas Gets an "F"

Sex "Education" Has Failed Texas Students, Says Texas State University Study

Abstinence-only sex education doesn't work. You know it. Bristol Palin knows it. Shoot, anyone who has ever been or met a teenager knows that telling them to "just say no" is the best and possibly only way to get them to says yes, yes, YES!Still, it's nice that the folks at the Texas Freedom Network ... More >>

HIV Numbers Cloud Condom Sense

Thirteen Years Later, Dallas County May Finally Get Back its Condom Sense

In the wake of this morning's news that Dallas County may, at long last, overturn its 13-year-old no-condom distribution policy due to the rise in number of AIDS and HIV cases, it's worth revisiting the ghosts of Christmas past. Because in April 1995, The New York Times came to town to question why ... More >>

Jogging Awareness

Run a 5K to spite AIDS

Teaching Teens How to Parent and Stop Having Children

Battling the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, Texas counselors have their work cut out

P.P.T. Crew Video and Skinny on S.P.E.A.K. Project

Fort Worth’s smartest, most animated, most illin’-est* hip-hop crew P.P.T. just sent out the video to its latest single, “Down South Girl,” from the group's Idol Records release Tres Monos in Love. Waco hip-hop band Strange Fruit Project lent a huge hand to P.P.T. by producing the video and ... More >>

This is a Test

Casual Saturday

Let your neck breathe for charity

Out of Focus

A shift in AIDS funding from services to drugs threatens poor patients

The Missing People's Agenda

Plus: The Turkey Test; New Sheriff in Town

Reach Out

AIDS Outreach Center has family fun and a family fund-raiser

Cocktail Hours

The latest AIDS medications give life to the dying--but what kind of life?

Get a Life

Fight AIDS one step at a time

Consider the Source

Planned Parenthood refuses to give up the dole without a fight

Déjà Vu

Advocates say University Park paramedics shunned a man with AIDS--at an AIDS awareness rally

In a Silent Way

The paintings of John Wilcox create a tension disguised as minimalism

Living La Vida SIDA

After his younger brother died of AIDS, Joseluis Partida dedicated his life to warning people about the disease. But the politics of being gay and Hispanic made it tougher than he ever imagined.

Good eggs

For some infertile Dallas couples, science, commerce, and a few genetically attractive women provide the next best thing to Mother Nature

No idle threat

Unacceptable Risk

Texas health officials say that mandatory childhood vaccinations against hepatitis B will prevent the spread of life-threatening illness. But which is riskier--the disease or the vaccine?

Night & Day

October 29 - November 4, 1998

Stormy seas

The Yellow Boat sails a sweet, troubled journey

Epidemic of hope

A new family of drugs may offer AIDS patients a new lease on life