Texas’ restrictive abortion law previews a post-Roe America
"Making Abortion Murder "How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement .. bits .. Without Birth Control: 6 zygotes will “die” With Birth Control: 2 zygotes will “die”""
Pregnant Texans have found ways to access abortion despite the restrictions, while clinics have pivoted their operations to focus on out-of-state care.
by Eleanor Klibanoff May 3, 2022 Updated: May 4, 2022
When Politico published a draft opinion leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, the nation confronted the reality that Roe v. Wade and constitutional protections for abortion may be overturned as soon as this summer.
But for many in Texas, that day is already here. The second-largest state in the country has been living under the nation’s most restrictive abortion law since Sept. 1, when legislators managed to skirt judicial precedent and ban all abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.
“We have been living the last eight months in a post-Roe Texas,” said Neesha Davé, deputy director of the Lilith Fund. “It has been absolutely devastating for people seeking abortion care … As we have been navigating this, we have learned a lot.”
Texas offers a glimpse of what the future holds for the dozens of other states that plan to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned — and for the people left to navigate those increased restrictions.
IMAGE - Abortion clinics in Texas and neighboring states Here are the abortion-providing clinics in and around Texas, as of April 2022. Clinics are typically in urban areas.
In the months since the law went into effect, pregnant Texans have flooded clinics in neighboring states and found ways to order abortion-inducing medication online .. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/25/abortion-medication-ban-texas/ , while others have carried unwanted pregnancies to term. Clinics have pivoted to helping shuttle people out of state, and abortion funds have struggled to keep up with the need.
“We definitely hear from our clients a lot of frustration about how they have to work to access this medical care,” Davé said. “And we know it’s just going to get harder from here.”
The big pivot
When Texas first passed its ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, abortion clinics leaped into action. They’ve been trying to beat back these sorts of restrictions for years now.
IMAGE - Here’s how early pregnancy works Doctors measure pregnancy by gestational age, which starts on the first day of the last menstrual period before someone gets pregnant. For people with a typical 28-day menstrual cycle, here’s the timeline:
WEEK 0 Menstrual period starts
1
2 Ovulation Conception happens if a sperm fertilizes the egg
3 Implantation The fertilized egg attaches to the uterus and pregnancy officially starts
4 Missed period
5 Window of abortion under SB 8 At this point, a pregnancy test would come back positive, but people with irregular cycles may not suspect they are pregnant
6 Abortions prohibited after cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound, around six weeks gestation Source: American Pregnancy Association, Cleveland Clinic Credit: Mandi Cai
While they waited on the courts, they tended to patients, providing their usual standard of care, right up until the moment the law went into effect. But when the clock struck midnight on Sept. 1, business as usual came to a halt. With one brief exception .. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/01/texas-abortion-law-blocked/ , clinics in Texas stopped providing abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac activity, usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
This is what experts anticipate will happen in the 26 states that intend to ban abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
“The clinics will shut down if abortion becomes illegal, at least as far as providing abortions,” said South Texas College of Law Professor Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, in an interview last month. “Just like we’ve seen with [Texas’ law], they will not … risk the criminal consequences. There will just not be legal abortion providers in these states.”
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In Texas, all of the clinics that were operating at the time the law went into effect have continued providing abortions up to that six-week mark. They’ve relied heavily on donations and, in many cases, had to change their focus significantly.
Whole Woman’s Health operates four clinics in Texas and five in other states. After Texas’ law went into effect, it opened a clinic near the airport in Minneapolis. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, Minnesota is expected to be a “haven state” for abortion.
“Right now, we’re already seeing about 30% of our clients in our Minnesota clinic come from Texas,” said Wendy Brown-Spaulding, development director for Whole Woman's Health Alliance. “And we’re expecting to see that number tick up drastically. But we’re definitely prepared.”
Whole Woman’s Health has also invested heavily in its new “wayfinding program,” which helps Texans get to one of its other clinics in states where abortion remains more accessible. They work with abortion funds to help patients pay for travel and related expenses.
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Brown-Spaulding said it’s too soon to know what the future holds for the organization’s four clinics in Texas, but it’s clear that it is investing in building clinics — and helping people access those clinics — in states that are safer bets for abortion access.
Continuing to access abortion care
Early data indicated that the number of abortions in Texas had dropped by more than half after the new law went into effect in September. But over time, it’s become clear that pregnant Texans are still finding ways to access abortions — even if they have to travel long distances or violate the law to do so.
The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html .. analyzed two studies from the University of Texas at Austin and found that out-of-state abortions and online requests for abortion medication made up much of the gap for pregnant people who otherwise would have sought an abortion in the state.
The Texas Policy Evaluation Project .. http://sites.utexas.edu/txpep/files/2022/03/TxPEP-out-of-state-SB8.pdf .. found that nearly 1,400 Texans each month obtained abortions at clinics in just seven nearby states after the law went into effect. That’s nearly equivalent to the number of Texans who traveled out of state for abortion care in 2017, 2018 or 2019.
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Another study from Abigail Aiken, a professor at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs, found that requests for abortion-inducing medication .. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/25/abortion-medication-ban-texas/ .. from an international reproductive rights nonprofit skyrocketed after the law went into effect. Texas passed another law .. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/02/texas-ban-medical-abortion/ .. in 2021 that made it illegal to prescribe these medications via telemedicine or provide them through the mail, but that didn’t stop more than 130 Texans a day from requesting these medications.
These studies do not take into account pregnant people who sought abortion-inducing medication from other sources, went over the border to Mexico for an abortion or otherwise terminated a pregnancy.
“It’s clear from this research and many studies that just because you make abortion harder to get, it doesn’t mean the need for abortion goes away,” Aiken told The Texas Tribune in February. “And many people, they will look for other ways of doing that.”
“And these states are not randomly distributed,” said University of Texas at Austin law professor Liz Sepper. “This would effectively end abortion access, at least in people’s home states in the South and Midwest.”
Nearly half of all Texans who left the state to access abortion went to Oklahoma , according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project research, which last month passed a total abortion ban .. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/05/oklahoma-abortion-texas-ban/ .. that will go into effect this summer. This week, Oklahoma followed Texas in passing a ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, which is similarly enforced through private lawsuits.
More than a quarter of Texans went to New Mexico, which is expected to continue to allow largely unfettered access to abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned. But Las Cruces, the nearest city with an abortion clinic, is a 10- to 12-hour drive from most of Texas’ population centers.
“Folks who have resources will always be able to access the care they need, even if they have to jump over or navigate countless barriers to be able to do so,” Davé said. “But it is absolutely lower-income folks [and] people of color … who are disproportionately impacted by abortion bans.”
She said that’s what they’ve seen play out under Texas’ law, and that’s what they expect to see happen as restrictions tighten across the country.
“It’s logistically very difficult [to travel] when you are already caring for children, when you are working, when you don’t have paid time off of work,” she said. “We will absolutely see people who are forced to remain pregnant against their will.”
Abortion opponents feel unprepared
Some of those people will turn to crisis pregnancy centers, nonprofits that counsel pregnant people against abortion. Some provide counseling, job training and baby items; some have been accused of using deceptive practices .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20797893-tpcn-2018-2019 .. to lure in vulnerable people looking for abortion care.
Texas has invested over $100 million into crisis pregnancy centers, more than any other state. Abortion opponents have argued that makes Texas more prepared to handle an increase in people carrying their pregnancies to term. The program has little government oversight .. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/08/texas-abortion-budget/ .
Vincent DiCaro, chief outreach officer of Care Net, said the group’s 82 Texas crisis pregnancy centers have seen more clients since the law went into effect — and a different kind of client.
“They’ve had more clients that feel a little bit more desperate than they might have before that law passed, or feel sort of a little bit more pressure to make a decision,” he said.
DiCaro said this surge in demand in Texas has shown his organization that the current network of crisis pregnancy centers isn’t ready to meet the needs of the people they hope to serve.
“We think crisis pregnancy centers are awesome, of course,” he said. “But if that’s the only solution, we’re not going to have enough manpower to help all of the people who are going to need help if Roe v. Wade gets overturned.”
He would like to see churches step up and fill in that gap and points to the pregnant people continuing to seek abortions outside of Texas as evidence that they’re not doing enough to meet the need.
“We need to have that support network running at full steam, so that whenever somebody is facing an unplanned pregnancy and doesn’t know what to do, they know that there’s somebody that they can turn to in their community,” he said. “A lot of people that would consider themselves to be pro-life say that winning is overturning Roe v. Wade. … Our question is, are we actually prepared to win?”
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Correction, May 4, 2022: A previous version of this story included a quote from Whole Women’s Health Alliance saying that the organization would pay for travel to its clinics. The organization now says an executive misspoke and that it works with abortion funds to help patients pay for travel but does not provide the funding.
‘I got in the car and he blindfolded me. I was willing to risk death’: five women on abortions before Roe
"Making Abortion Murder "How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement .. bits .. Without Birth Control: 6 zygotes will “die” With Birth Control: 2 zygotes will “die”""
Related: What Americans think about abortion, in 3 charts Americans overwhelmingly support abortion rights, but vary on the specifics. By Rani Molla@ranimolla Updated Jun 24, 2022, 10:43am EDT 85% say abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances. Further into pregnancy fewer agree. More Americans are pro-choice than 25 years ago https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23167397/abortion-public-opinion-polls-americans
From left to right: Trudy Hale, Sarah B Thompson, Fran Moreland Johns, Barbara Lee and Carol Deanow. Composite: Provided photos
If the supreme court reverses the federal right to abortion, some Americans will no longer have access to the procedure. Five women speak of their experience in pre-Roe v Wade era
Candice Pires and Clare Considine Thu 16 Jun 2022 15.00 AEST Last modified on Thu 16 Jun 2022 15.17 AEST
Roe v Wade, the landmark US supreme court .. https://www.theguardian.com/law/us-supreme-court .. decision that has given Americans abortion rights since 22 January 1973, was set to turn 50 next year. This June, as the supreme court approaches summer recess, it looks likely to release a decision that means the critical precedent will never reach its landmark birthday.
With the regulation of abortion returned to individual states, a large swath of the midwest and south – about 20 states housing half of the country’s population – will no longer have access to legal abortion.
This is set to see a return to abortion experiences that have many similarities to pre-Roe v Wade America. Pre-1973, those with the necessary means travelled across state lines to get the procedures they needed. Today, like back then, campaigners fear that poor, Black, Latina, teenage women and undocumented immigrants will be disproportionately affected. What is different today is that some women will be able to to access abortion pills over the internet and self-manage the procedure.
One advocacy group, Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights, is made up of older women who fight to protect the reproductive rights they campaigned to secure pre-Roe v Wade. “Often abortions are talked about as endings,” says executive director Kelli Wescott McCannell. “The women in our program have decades of life since their abortions that show what was made possible for them because of that abortion.”
Here we speak to five women from across the US about their experiences of abortion in the pre-Roe v Wade era. Some were nervous, others defiant. But all shared their story in the hope that their past could shape America’s future.
‘I crawled up on the kitchen table and she had this can of Lysol’
I heard through the grapevine that a guy we knew, who was a dealer – it was all just grass and acid then – knew a doctor who did abortions. I asked the dealer, Larry, and he said, “Oh yeah, sure. It’s $300.” I had no money. I lived with my dad and two brothers in a two-bedroom duplex and I was in my freshman year of college. So I stole clothes and sold them.
I gave Larry the $300 and he told me he’d come pick me up at 6am. He drove this big blue Oldsmobile convertible. I got in the car and he blindfolded me. I was scared but had to be alert to try and sense where we were going. I was willing to risk death rather than have my father find out I was pregnant.
Larry led me into this house and up some stairs. He tightened the blindfold. The house sounded vacant. He took me into a room and said, “Take down your pants and lie down,” and then left. I remember lying there and a radio playing an interview with a farmer who was talking about how to plant crowder peas. Then I heard footsteps and at least two people came into the room. No one spoke. There was the clink and clank of instruments, and then Larry said, “Spread your legs.” Someone inserted a rubber tube into me to induce a miscarriage. There was no pain. They left the tube in there and it was cut long and left coiled in my underpants.
Larry drove me back and I only took the blindfold off when we got home. I was a good student and went straight to class. I remember sitting in the lunchroom, feeling this tube in my pants, and nothing happening. I went home, went to sleep, still nothing. The next day, I called Larry and told him. He reluctantly said he’d set up a time to do it again. And so I went through the whole thing again. But the same thing happened, it didn’t work.
I became desperate and terrified. I was getting bigger and couldn’t button my pants. I must have been almost three months pregnant.
I told my friend, Mary-Ann, who was five years older and this rough, wild kind of character; she’d been in the navy and had had a dishonourable discharge. “Well, I can do it,” she said. “When I was in the Navy I stole all the stuff.”
So we went to her father’s house while he was out. She put on greens and was very proud of her surgical prowess. I crawled up on the kitchen table and she had this can of Lysol that she was spraying around the room to disinfect it. She used the same technique with the rubber tube except she inserted it much further.
I went home and the contractions started. By now it’s night-time. My brothers were roaming around the house and I went into the bathroom and someone’s banging on the door and I just freaked out because the pain was so bad. I had to get out.
I called Mary-Ann and she had a friend come pick me up. We went looking for a motel. It was cold, maybe late December. In a parking lot, I threw myself on the hood of a car so the snow would numb me.
We scraped together $8 for a single room and my friend snuck me in. It was eight hours of pain. I was beating my head against the wall while he brought me towels to soak up the blood. Finally, the fetus came out. I was shocked when the placenta came out after; I thought it was twins.
At 18, I hated the idea of having a child. There’s no telling what kind of a mother I would have been then. I never regretted it. It’s not until I was 30 that I chose to have children.
‘When we got home we told people we’d been in Memphis, shopping’
Sarah B Thompson,68, retired school librarian, Fayetteville, Arkansas Abortion: 1971, aged 17, New York
It was the summer before I was due to go to college. My parents let me fly to Oklahoma City from our home in Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit my best friend. There were lots of wild nights of partying, skinny dipping and beer drinking.
When my period was a day late, I suspected I might be pregnant but was in denial. Every afternoon, my mother and I would watch soap operas together while we ate lunch, and I started not being able to stay awake. My period never came.
I talked to a couple of friends. One told me about a local gynaecologist who could advise me what to do. When I called his office, I guess they realised they were dealing with a child because I got in quickly. I went by myself and the doctor was so patient and kind. He said I was about 12 weeks pregnant. “Sarah,” he told me, “you’re going to have to go home and tell your parents.” Because abortion was illegal in Arkansas, he said I was going to have to travel to New York if I wanted one.
I had old southern parents, very traditional. When I told them, I could tell they were disappointed and worried. They contacted the gynaecologist and he connected them to a doctor in New York. It was arranged quickly. Mother and I were to fly to New York City and Daddy would stay home. We were not rich, but Daddy had savings.
The day of the flight, Mother and I got dressed up to travel, as you did in those days. Early the next morning, we went to New York City hospital. We had to find the bursar’s office as she had to pay cash upfront. There were big signs saying, “NO CHECKS”. Then we went upstairs and I put on a gown.
After that, there’s kind of a blank. I remember waiting on a gurney and then I remember waking up. I stayed in a ward overnight with three other women who’d just had abortions. They were all older than me. We talked. One was putting on her false eyelashes and getting ready to go back to Florida. Another was married and her husband would come in to see her. I think we all felt fortunate to be there; to have safe, legal healthcare.
When we got home we told people we’d been in Memphis, shopping for college clothes. It was a good story for the older relatives. My mother said, “Sarah, we will never speak of this again.”
Three weeks after the abortion, my parents dropped me off at the University of Arkansas, helped me unpack and drove away. I was able to show up with my classmates from high school and begin my new life.
‘My rapist gave me a phone number and $100’
Fran Moreland Johns,88, writer, San Francisco, California Abortion: 1956, aged 22, Atlanta, Georgia
When I realized I was pregnant, I went back to my rapist because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. He gave me a phone number and $100, which was more than my monthly income. The man who raped me was basically my boss. I was right out of college and worked in public relations for petroleum companies. He was wealthy and prominent and had a family. I’d babysat his kids. I lived with my sister. We were one year apart in school and joined at the hip but it was so shameful I didn’t tell her.
I called the number and just said, “I need help.” A man on the other end replied, “Do you have the cash?” He gave me instructions to stand in front of a theatre downtown on Sunday at 9am, and that if anyone was with me, the deal would be off. I had no idea what was going to happen. I just figured he would get me ‘unpregnant’. I was completely numb.
It was a cold rainy February morning and the worst day of my life. A car pulled up, I got into the back seat and the man in the front handed me a blue bandanna to cover my eyes. We pulled up to a small house and he told me I could take my blindfold off. Inside was a woman, I presume his wife or girlfriend, and she showed me to a little room with a table. She told me to lie on the table and then the man came in, inserted something into my vagina, I think it was a straw, and that was it. I don’t think he washed his hands. It took minutes. We got back in the car and he dropped me off where he’d picked me up. He said, “You’ll start bleeding in a little while,” and I did and it did not stop and I was terrified.
Monday morning, I was still bleeding. I still didn’t tell my sister. Getting an abortion was more shameful than having been raped. I called into work sick and went to my obstetrician. “Who did this to you?” he said. I would not have told him, or anyone else, in a million years. My allegiance was to the abortionist – he had given me my life back. The obstetrician did a D&C and gave me a lot of medicine to combat the infection. I’m just the luckiest person in the world to have not died of sepsis.
‘I was so worried someone would find out’
Congresswoman Barbara Lee,75, California Abortion: Aged 16, Mexico
There were two things I was afraid of. First of all, that I was going to die because unsafe septic abortions were the main cause of death for black women in the 1960s. And that I was going to be put in jail because it was illegal. On top of that, the stigma was awful. I was so worried someone would find out. I went to a Catholic school, was the first black cheerleader, and I was pregnant. As a teenager, those were very hard times before Roe v Wade.
We lived in California, where abortion was illegal. When I told my mother, she let me make my own decision and then she sent me to a friend of hers in Texas, who traveled with me to have the abortion in Mexico, where it was also illegal.
I grew up pretty quickly after because I recognized that I didn’t have a right to make decisions about my own body. And that forced me to learn more about how this country provides for women’s bodily autonomy. I got involved in campaigning for Shirley Chisholm .. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jan/04/guardianobituaries.haroldjackson .. and she was one of the first black women I knew who was out there speaking for reproductive justice, and how racial equity and economic equity had to be part of that.
‘I don’t remember much about the procedure except the doctor saying, ‘Don’t make any noise’ Carol Deanow, 79, retired professor of social work, Brookline, Massachusetts Abortion: 1965, aged 22, Washington DC
I was dating somebody but we weren’t at all serious. He refused to use a condom and I was too naive to say, “No condom, no sex.” I missed my period and quickly knew what was happening. I never considered for a minute carrying the pregnancy to term. It was just not going to be part of my life at that point. I had a plan: I was going to finish my PhD and teach.
I told the guy I’d been dating – we may not have even been dating by the time I realized I was pregnant. He said, “Well, I guess I should ask you to marry me.” I told him not to be silly. “We both know we aren’t going to do this,” I said. And I told a friend who I knew could get me the name of someone to perform an abortion. Her friend knew a friend who knew a friend who had accompanied somebody to one; it was that kind of underground network.
The unwritten rule among girls at my college was that you never let your checking account go under $300. We all knew what that meant. So I had the money. I don’t think the guy contributed financially. And I don’t know that I would have allowed him to; it was always considered the woman’s problem. He did drive me the hour-long journey from Baltimore to Washington for the procedure.
We went to a small office and the person who carried it out was an MD. I was fortunate but it still felt very illegal. The room wasn’t sterile, like an operating room, but it was clean and professional. I remember almost nothing about the procedure except the doctor saying, “Don’t make any noise.” And that it was painful, there was no anaesthesia.
My ride drove me back to my dorm. That was the last time I saw him. I threw up in the middle of the lobby and told everyone I had the flu.
I was relieved. I felt like I’d done something very wrong but I had to do it. We were taught to feel shame and guilt. It was the illegality of it. When I went home after that summer, I told my father I needed to see a psychiatrist. I felt like I wasn’t making good decisions and was out of control.
A few years later, I went to social work school. When I was given an assignment to write about someone I knew who had done something deviant, I wrote about myself and my abortion. My male instructor commented on the paper: “It’s been a long time since I considered an abortion a deviant act.” It was the first time I’d heard anyone talk about abortion without negativity. It was wonderful. Life-changing.
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