On a warm afternoon in January, Lucy Felix steers down a bumpy dirt road in a dusty black Honda Element, a white megaphone in her lap. She hangs a right into the driveway of a dilapidated mobile home with boarded-up windows. “Ladies!” the bespectacled 43-year-old hollers in Spanish through the megaphone. “Meet us down the street in an hour! Come! There will be free food and prizes!”

Felix’s cries of mujeres and gratis could be confused for the promotional dance-club vans that roll around parts of Latin America, blaring Reggaeton at ungodly hours. But she's shouting about Pap smears, not complimentary drinks before 11 p.m., and she's in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, not Mexico City.

Felix, a Texas field organizer for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and her petite, perfectly coiffed 65-year-old mother, Lucila Ceballos, have been leading reproductive health workshops in the valley, an economically depressed stretch of borderland at the state's southernmost tip, since 2011. That's when the GOP-controlled Texas legislature slashed $73 million from the state’s family-planning budget, leaving approximately 147,000 women without access to affordable preventative health care and shuttering more than 50 clinics statewide. It’s a move that women’s rights advocates—and some legislators—say is more about restricting access to abortion and contraception than saving money. "Of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything—that's what family planning is supposed to be about," declared state Rep. Wayne Christian, a Republican, in an interview with The Texas Tribune. Lawmakers also passed a ban on "abortion affiliates," thereby barring all Planned Parenthood health centers from receiving state funding. The legislation is estimated to impact upwards of 50,000 women, many of them with low incomes.

The cuts have created a public health disaster, especially for the state’s Latina community, which is plagued by high rates of cervical cancer and other reproductive health problems. “We are witnessing the dismantling of a safety net that took decades to build and could not easily be recreated even if funding were restored soon,” wrote a doctor and three academics in a New England Journal of Medicine article in 2012. Conservative politicians have since felt the political repercussions of their decisions. Reeling from accusations of a "war on women," Republican state senators last year proposed adding $100 million for women’s health services back into the state’s primary-care program. But advocates say it’s too little, too late. "It’s hard to put back together a system that’s been dismantled," said Sarah Wheat, vice president for community affairs for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.

The cuts have had a disproportionate impact on the million-plus residents living in the overwhelmingly Latino, notoriously impoverished Rio Grande Valley. Nine of the valley’s 32 state-funded family planning clinics have shut down, while others reduced services and raised fees, according to a joint report from the Center for Reproductive Rights and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. Before the cuts, basic reproductive services like Pap tests, breast exams, contraceptive services and counseling, and STI testing, were available at clinics for little to no cost. But the shutdowns have ushered in a new era for Texas women: higher costs, fewer services. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of women in the valley getting family-planning services at clinics funded by the Texas Department of State Health Services plummeted by 72 percent, according to the NLIRH report.