Created infographic to highlight the impact of budget cuts on women's health in Texas
MIT student collaborator: Elizabeth Resor
View full poster (pdf).

I worked with MIT classmate Elizabeth Resor to analyze and visualize the impact of the Texas budget cuts on women's access to family planning services. As students of cartography, we wondered if we could employ cartography to illuminate a social justice issue in an easily understandable and high visible way. We decided we would make an infographic poster to highlight the severity of the budget cuts and to illustrate where in Texas these were occurring and how this related to rates of health insurance coverage. We selected health insurance coverage because it closely correlates to poverty rates and also because women without health insurance are more likely to use a state clinic or Planned Parenthood. Our intention was to use design and cartography to create a compelling poster that draws attention to the issue of poor women being disproportionately impacted by family planning service cuts.

We collected information on budget reductions and closures from newspapers and journals. We downloaded a kml file of the locations of currently-funded clinics (i.e., after the budget cuts) from the Texas Department of tate Health Services online Family Planning Clinic Locator Map. At the time, Planned Parenthood Clinics had lost funding but some still remained open. We mined location data from the PlannedParenthood.org to determine which Texas clinics still operated. We collected data on rates of health insurance coverage by county from the U.S.Census Bureau.