You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Lovecast, www.com.

If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony,

well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast.

Here's a distressing headline I stumbled over this morning, one that I'm highlighting here so it doesn't get lost in this week's tsunami of distressing headlines.

Texas lawmakers failed to address rising pregnancy-related death rate during their legislative session.

Hannah Gold, writing at Jezebel, the feminist news site, was reacting to and signal-boosting, as the kids say,

an Associated Press story that, holy shit, did not bury the lead.

From the Associated Press, lawmakers in Texas failed to take any significant action to address

the state's skyrocketing rate of pregnancy-related deaths just months after researchers found

it to be the highest, not only in the U.S., but the developed world.

The pregnancy-related death rate in Texas, the numbers of pregnant women dying every year doubled between 2010 and 2012, a study from the University of Maryland found.

Now, in fairness to Texas, a state dominated by anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trans, pro-Trump, pro-police brutality, pro-pollution, pro-climate catastrophe, elected officials who aren't themselves interested in being fair to anyone. In fairness to Texas, maternal death rates rose all over the United States during the same period, but by a percentage point or two. In Texas,

maternal death rates doubled, which the authors of the report said couldn't be explained, quote,

in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval. Now, they meant a shooting war,

of course, obviously, because you know what, there actually is a war on in Texas, they could have mentioned. And it's not a shooting war, of course, obviously, because you know what, there actually is a war on

in Texas, they could have mentioned. And it's not a shooting war, but it is an ongoing war against

women in Texas and all other states controlled by Republican telebangelists. Legislators in Texas

are waging war on women's health care, defunding Planned Parenthood, blocking Medicaid expansion under

Obamacare. In 2011 alone, as Molly Redden highlighted at The Guardian, the Texas State Legislature,

controlled by televangelists, cut $74 million from the state's $111 million family planning budget.

So, yeah, there's a war on, a war with casualties and a body

count. The news out of Texas is especially galling for those of us whose memories stretch all the

...