The Texas abortion ban has turned clinics into travel agencies

[Nevilledog]

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Mother Jones
@MotherJones
Abortion bans don’t end abortion—they just send patients scrambling for alternatives. “When patients decide they want abortion care, they are very determined to be unpregnant.”

motherjones.com
The Texas abortion ban has turned clinics into travel agencies
Nine months under what was the country’s harshest anti-abortion law offers a preview of our bleak post-Roe future.
11:30 AM · Jun 13, 2022

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/texas-clinics-abortion-ban-pivot-services-travel/

Patients entering the bright third-floor offices of Houston Women’s Reproductive Services used to follow the familiar steps for a routine medical appointment: check in, get your blood pressure taken, have other vitals examined. But for the past nine months, the typical rhythms and protocols have been completely upended. These days, patients seeking abortion care are rushed straight to an ultrasound—lab work comes later. They are often overcome with palpable anxiety. “Our patients are absolutely panicked when they come in. They are nervous wrecks, they are trembling with fear,” says administrator and founder Kathy Kleinfeld. “It’s heartbreaking. So we try to get them the answers they need right away.”

The answer they need immediately is if they are within the narrow six-week mark and can qualify for an abortion in Texas under a draconian law, Senate Bill 8, that bans abortion care in the state once embryonic cardiac activity is detected. “We are all holding our breath during every sonogram,” says Kleinfeld.

The small staff of four full-time employees is also consumed with urgency and anxiety; if abortion care takes place past the strict timeframe, that could mean costly and destructive career-ending lawsuits.

There are some who are within the window and can obtain abortion care at the clinic. They usually “burst into tears” of relief, says Kleinfeld, though they still have to wait 24 hours following the ultrasound, as mandated by another 2011 state law. But then, there are the more than 300 in-person patients—and thousands of callers—who the clinic has been forced to turn away since the ban took effect. These are the people, Kleinfeld says, who feel “devastated” and “deeply shocked.” Some end up confused and dazed, burdened with processing how and even if they can secure the resources and manage the logistics required to make the trek out of state. How is it possible to get child care, time off work, and money for transportation and lodging? Providers and advocates resoundingly stress it is low-income Texans and people of color who have been disproportionately affected by the severe law and who are most likely to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

As a result, Texas clinics have been transformed into what are essentially somber travel agencies. Since September of last year, when SB 8 took effect, an average of nearly 1,400 Texans traveled out of state for abortion care each month, a figure nearly equivalent to the number that traveled every year between 2017 and 2019, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. Some are forced to travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles for an abortion, causing a “domino effect” by delaying care for others at health clinics across the country, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

*snip*

[blue neen]

1. It's women who are going through this trauma.

It's not "patients" or "people". It's women. Why can't we emphasize that Republicans are doing everything they can to control women's lives?

Let's get real here.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. It's true, some of the patients are women and all of them are people.

Some of the patients are not women, and all women are people.

[blue neen]

3. IMHO, many Republicans don't see women as people. They see them as incubators.

Just vessels to birth babies.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R