The long drive to end a pregnancy

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The long drive to end a pregnancy

On the 407 miles of open road between home and a Montana abortion clinic, a woman has a lot of time to think about how she got from there to here

Written by Monica Hesse
Photos by Melina Mara
Published on May 6, 2015

She had made a plan and now there was nothing left to do but follow it: a map in the console, a caffeinated tea in the cupholder, a tank filled with enough gas that she wouldn’t have to stop for hours. Now Emily sat in front of her house in Wyoming and made a final preparation, picking up her phone and typing in an address for an abortion clinic in Montana, 407 miles away, where she would drive and then no longer be pregnant.

It was 3:21 in the morning. The houses in her neighborhood were quiet, and the mountains behind them were dark, and when Emily first moved here she thought the landscape was so pretty, and now it just seemed lonely. She turned off of one road onto the next, and in the blackness there was a flash of movement. A deer darted into the street. She braked until it passed, a fawn lit by her headlights, running toward the bushes across the road.

“Oh, it’s a baby,” she said, and there were 406 miles left to go.

This was a drive Emily had never taken for a procedure she hadn’t imagined needing, in a time when fewer clinics and tougher laws were making the geography of abortion more complex. Because of the sensitivity of the abortion issue, The Washington Post agreed with Emily’s request not to use her last name or identify where she lives. In some parts of America, the accessibility of abortion has remained unchanged, but not in great swaths of the country — not in places such as Texas, where more than half of the clinics have closed since 2013, or in South Dakota, where the single clinic has a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between appointment and procedure, or in Wyoming, where there is one private provider and no clinics in all the state’s 98,000 square miles, and where the nearest facility Emily could find an appointment was six hours away.

[Ilsa]

1. It used to be a hard ride on a horse,

Lots of jumping. Women would ride horseback to try and end an unwanted pregnancy. I doubt there was ever any data collected or known anecdotally on whether this worked with any regularity.

But a 400 mile drive (or whatever) is still difficult and expensive. Just more hassle and money.

[Boudica the Lyoness]

2. I don't think an ultra-sound is necessary to determine

the correct age of a fetus.

I have my first baby over 40 years ago and the age of the fetus could be determined pretty close without an ultra-sound. I wonder if this is done in an attempt to change a woman's mind.