New laws prompt abortion travel aid
Fund aids poor women who cannot get timely services close to home.
The young woman lived in Dallas, 650 miles from Albuquerque, N.M., but that is where she would have to go for an abortion, she was told. New state regulations had forced several of Dallas’ six abortion clinics to close, creating waits of multiple weeks. By the time the woman could get in, she would be up against the Texas ban on abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation.
But she could not afford the trip.
So it was that she had left a phone message with a hotline in Austin and, on a recent evening, heard back from Lenzi Sheible, the 20-year-old founder of a fund to help low-income women pay the costs of traveling for abortions in Texas — or to states beyond.
By the end of the evening, Sheible had texted the woman confirmation numbers for a flight the next day, and four nights’ stay at an Albuquerque hotel.
Like an entrepreneur meeting a new market demand, Sheible, among others, has stepped up as women are finding it increasingly difficult to get abortions across large areas of the United States. In just over three years, according to
the Guttmacher Institute, states have passed 231 laws restricting abortion, more than any time in the four decades since the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.
Although established groups like Planned Parenthood remain active, and other organizations subsidize poor women’s costs for abortion procedures, Sheible is filling what she calls a new need in Texas for help with lodging and transportation.
“The entire western half of Texas is an abortion clinic desert,” Sheible wrote on the website of the nonprofit organization, Fund Texas Choice, which she started 15 months ago.
To Kimberly I. McGuire, a director at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, groups like Sheible’s are crucial.
“It’s a reaction to a sense of desperation across the country as more clinics close, as more communities are left without providers,” especially communities of low-income minority and rural women, she said.
Sheible, now pregnant with her second child, quickly drew the attention of the anti-abortion movement in the state. Texas Right to Life published an article in April that compared her fund “to trains that brought Jews to Auschwitz.”
Her own past is as rough as that of any of the women she helps. Born to a troubled woman who gave her up at age 7 — Sheible does not know her biological father — she spent a month of her senior year in a drug rehabilitation center. But she graduated as valedictorian, with enough academic credits to get through the University of Texas in two years. She now attends its law school.
In summer 2013, Sheible started her fund immediately after Texas enacted some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the nation. The laws, both in Texas and in other Republican-dominated states, commonly impose at least a 24-hour wait between a woman’s first clinic visit and an abortion, forcing many outof-towners to book hotels. They require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and mandate that clinics meet the same costly equipment, building and staffing standards as an ambulatory surgical center. Clinics that cannot comply must close.
Supporters say the laws protect women’s health in case of emergencies. Abortion-rights advocates counter that the regulations are not only unnecessary, given the safety record of abortions and the availability of emergency room care, but also unconstitutional because of a Supreme Court ruling against “undue burdens” on women seeking abortions.
More such laws are expected, however, now that Republicans expanded their control of state and federal offices in this month’s elections. The next Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, wants to make a ban on abortions after 20 weeks the law of the land.
In few places has the effect been as drastic as in Texas. From 42 abortion clinics in 13 cities in May 2013, Texas now has about 20 clinics and soon might be down to eight in four metropolitan areas — Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, says NARAL Pro-Choice Texas — if advocates lose an appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.