Defunding Planned Parenthood on a lie, and the unintended consequences of doubling down.

Based on the now discredited videos vilifying Planned Parenthood, Republicans are still trying to cut their funding in the Badger state:

The Senate took up the bills reducing government payments to Planned Parenthood as a separate measure backed by abortion opponents...

Yes, Republicans are still going to do it, even after:

a grand jury indicted two anti-abortion activists from the Center for Medical Progress.

Oddly, reality is making an even better case against Wisconsin's bad legislation.

Look at the Texas disaster, where identical legislation had passed and failed:

For the past five years, the Texas Legislature has done everything in its power to defund Planned Parenthood. Of the 82 clinics that have closed, only a third were Planned Parenthood.

Republicans here say other health providers will be able to step in, but that flies in the face of the facts. In another attack on rural conservative voters... NPR:

So in 2013, the Legislature essentially restored the money. But finding new providers, especially in the countryside, has been slow and difficult.

The Legislature's target was abortion, but the unintended consequence was that family planning clinics that had nothing to do with abortion, especially rural clinics, ran out of money. By 2014, 82 family planning clinics across the state had closed. The consequence was calamitous. In Midland, for example, when the Planned Parenthood clinic closed, there were two aftereffects: 8,000 well-women appointments a year vanished.

Despite these indisputable facts, Republicans aren't budging from their story:

JS: Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) saidwomen can get their birth control from other providers … "Since when is birth control a rare commodity? I think it's pretty easy to find.”

State Sen. Jon Erpenbach disputed that, saying women in northern Wisconsin and other rural areas have difficulty in accessing birth control.

The federal governments Title X money will now go to other providers in Wisconsin, but Texas tried the same thing and failed...

"A lot of the funding that has been allocated has gone to organizations that do not necessarily have the expertise or the necessary training to provide the types of family planning, contraceptive, preventive reproductive health care that the Planned Parenthood clinics provided," Kari White, one of the lead researchers said.

Republicans here say there won’t be a drop in getting the same care they got at PP:

Midland Community Healthcare Services Clinic in West Texas is open, and every day it's three lines deep as women file in for treatment. The numbers are harsh. In Texas, just 22 percent of childbearing-age women who qualify for subsidized preventive health care treatment actually get it.

And as usual, Republican aren’t the slight bit concerned about losing lots of money, it’s about a belief system:

The Legislature's own researchers predicted that more than 20,000 resulting unplanned births would cost taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars in federal and state Medicaid support.