Research: State’s law not stopping abortions
The number of women leaving Texas to obtain abortions has grown tenfold since lawmakers here banned the procedure after early pregnancy, according to new research from the University of Texas at Austin.
The findings, coupled with a huge uptick in online orders for abortion pills, suggest that the state’s widespread crackdown has not yet led to a large decline in procedures. While abortions at Texas clinics did fall by about half after the new restrictions took effect in September, many women still sought out to end their unwanted pregnancies through other, often more challenging paths.
The law “has not reduced the need for abortion care in Texas. Rather it has reduced in-state access,” said Dr. Kari White, lead investigator at the university’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
More than 5,500 Texans traveled to abortion clinics in six surrounding states between September and December of last year, according to the study. That’s nearly 1,400 trips per month, up from about 130 per month in the same period in 2019. The latest tally is likely an undercount, since some clinics did not participate and the study did not include trips to states farther from Texas.
The state’s new law, known as Senate Bill 8, prohibits abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, at around six weeks of pregnancy. It’s enforced by private citizens, who can sue anyone who helps a woman violate the law, from a doctor to a taxi driver, for at least $10,000 in damages. The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest.
The law has been initially
upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, opening the door for other anti-abortion states to copy Texas while the high court considers rolling back federal abortion protections later this year.
Abortion rights advocates are already preparing for states to cut access in more than two dozen states across the South and Midwest, and providers are rushing to build out clinic space in northern and coastal states more friendly to abortion rights.
The new findings from Texas may be an early picture of the scramble to come for women in other states. The vast majority of trips out of Texas were to Oklahoma and New Mexico, where clinics are on average several hundred miles from most Texans. Oklahoma has its own “trigger” abortion ban in place if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision protecting the right to abortion until about 23 weeks of pregnancy.
Women interviewed in the study said they faced heavy obstacles in seeking out abortions since the law took effect, including delays at clinics in and out of Texas. One in four said they had visited crisis pregnancy centers, which often discourage women from getting abortions. Researchers interviewed 65 women in total.
One 23-year-old in South Texas
said she went to a pregnancy center first because it offered free ultrasounds, and was then
put through a series of tests and medical referrals that pushed her past the six-week mark. She ended up driving 14 hours to get an abortion in New Mexico.
“At the pregnancy resource center, they were like, ‘Hey, you know what, there’s a faint heartbeat… We’re gonna send you to the OB/GYN team, so you can get ahead and started with (prenatal care),’” said the woman, as reported by the study’s authors. She is identified by her first name only. “Right after, I went to the OB/GYN and got the transvaginal sonogram or ultrasound. They’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s nothing here, they lied to you.’”
Data released last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed a nearly three-fold increase in daily requests to Aid Access, an Austrian nonprofit that ships and provides information about abortion pills. That resulted in about 900 requests per month between October and December.
Anti-abortion rights activists have acknowledged the shifting landscape, and say there is more work to be done down the road at blocking new means to abortion.
“What we’re seeing in Texas right now is kind of a preview of the post-roe world,” said John Seago, the political director at Texas Right to Life. “Even though elective abortion is not completely prohibited, we’re starting to see the factors that will be part of that state whenever abortion is made illegal completely.”