The Texas abortion clinic battle is about more than politics. It's about women's lives
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Version 0 of 1. Imagine you are a young woman who has just found out she is pregnant. You already have children and you’re only employed part-time. Maybe you’re in a violent relationship. Maybe you’ve been assaulted. Whatever your motivation, you know you cannot continue the pregnancy. But when you try to make an appointment at the nearest clinic – which is a hundred miles away – you’re told that there is a long waiting list. It’ll be a month-long wait for the abortion you should, medically-speaking, have right away, making it a more complicated and expensive procedure. You can’t afford that, so you start to think about going to another country with fewer regulations, where you heard about cheap drugs that will end the pregnancy. That is not a story that should happen in America – where abortion is legal – but it’s an increasingly common reality for many women. And, after today’s hearing from the 5th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in which the judges appeared to support Texas’ restrictive abortion laws, it’s potentially a daily reality for many more women in Texas. But in the midst of court decisions, a national debate over choice and lawmakers’ efforts to limit abortion rights, we cannot afford to forget that there are real people affected by these laws. Nan Little Kirkpatrick hears stories like the one above every day. Kirkpatrick is executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, one of five abortion funds in the state that help women who can’t afford the procedure. “Most of our clients are unemployed or employed part-time, most already have one child, many are victims of domestic violence or rape, and most are some form of government assistance – but Medicaid doesn’t cover abortion,” she told me. While Kirkpatrick and other organizations have been bracing themselves for today’s decision, they tell me that incredible damage has already been done – not just to clinics, but to women. The most common problem, Kirkpatrick told me, is that people are being forced to have abortions later and later into their pregnancy. “When you have fewer clinics, and fewer appointment times available, people are having to push their procedures into the 15th week when normally they would have been able to get it in the eight week,” she said. Later abortions not only mean a cruel waiting game for women desperate to end unwanted pregnancies, but that the procedure will be much more expensive – sometimes prohibitively so. Abortions in Texas already got more expensive in 2012,when the state’s sonogram law went into effect, which forced every woman to attend (and pay for) two appointments instead of one. And with women being forced to wait for appointments, many are forgoing abortions altogether because of the cost. A joint report on women in the Rio Grande Valley from the National Latina Institute on Reproductive Health and the Center for Reproductive Rights found a bleak situation created by the lack of abortion access, particularly for Latinas. Around 40% of the women in Texas are Latina, over one-third of the population in the Valley lives in poverty and the rate of uninsured people is extremely high. So when reproductive health clinics closed as a result of the law upheld today on appeal – clinics that didn’t just provide abortions, but low-cost reproductive health care across the board – women suffered. Suddenly, women weren’t sure where they could get birth control, Pap smears or mammograms. And if they could find where to obtain services, they couldn’t afford them: “Ana was able to afford $35 for a Pap test two years ago. The results troubled her doctor enough that he asked her back for an ultrasound – at a price of $400. She still has not received the services she needs”, the report explained. Kimberly Inez McGuire, the director of public affairs at the Latina Institute, added that contraception in the area has become so difficult to come by that they’re preparing to see an increase in unintended pregnancies. “The closing of the clinics really makes a bad situation even worse for women who can least afford those additional obstacles,” she told me. Inez McGuire also pointed out that the geography of the area will make it near impossible for undocumented women to obtain care. Most people know about border enforcement, she says, but few people outside Texas realize that there are internal border checkpoints, too: there’s a line of them right above the Rio Grande Valley, in between the valley and the only health clinics that would be available should HB2 be enacted and the local clinic closes once again. “So even if she could get the day off of work, somehow borrow a car or get transportation, somehow get child care and money for the abortion, she cannot cross that line because she will be apprehended by immigration enforcement,” Inez McGuire told me. The clinic closures and the disconnect of the law from women’s real lives also meant that some women weren’t even sure if they were still allowed to obtain abortion. Kirkpatrick told me that, after some restrictions went into effect late last year, she’s spoken to clients who thought abortion had become illegal. “We had to convince them there wasn’t a law against abortion,” she said. As abortion rights and access have taken center stage in the national debate, it’s become too easy to think of this issue as a set of laws, or a fight between two sides. But for those working on ground, it’s a fight for women’s humanity. Inez McGuire tells me that the women in the Rio Grande Valley are not sitting idly by. “They are organizing in their kitchens, in their community centers, and in the state capitol,” she said. “They refuse to be a statistic or a sad story”, she added. |