Bridget Grumet, Austin American-Statesman
Aug 30, 2023
Alison Auwerda was no longer pregnant. The medication abortion pills she ordered online, in spite of Texas’ ban on such things, had worked.
But an ultrasound confirmed what the cramping suggested: Her body had not expelled the last remnants of tissue from the terminated pregnancy.
“I'm like, Can I go to the hospital? Can I tell my doctor? My first thought was like, ‘Oh, I have to get a flight and go somewhere else,’” Auwerda, 39, told me.
With Texas’s strict abortion ban still in effect, patients have been forced to wait weeks for an appointment — disqualifying many who otherwise would have been able to access abortion
By Caroline Kitchener
Feb 14, 2022
When the woman started crying in the ultrasound room, Joe Nelson tried to comfort her, as he has comforted dozens of other patients who are too far along to get an abortion in Texas.
She was a single mother with two kids at home, experiencing a rare pregnancy condition that had left her too nauseous to work, said Nelson, a doctor at Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion clinic in Austin. The woman was over the legal limit established by Texas’s restrictive new law, Nelson said, but just barely. A few days earlier, he could have performed the abortion.
Continued:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/14/texas-abortion-sb8
Fri., December 31, 2021
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Sarah Weddington, who as a young lawyer from Texas won the Roe v. Wade case at the U.S. Supreme Court, is being remembered this week as a champion of feminism whose work impacted the nation's politics as views shifted on abortion. She died Sunday at age 76.
Weddington was 26 when she successfully argued the case that legalized the right to abortion throughout the United States. The Supreme Court's ruling in 1973 cemented her place in history.
Continued: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/roe-lawyer-sarah-weddington-helped-191220542.html
Awaiting a court decision, providers are serving far fewer patients and losing staff. “This is disaster management.”
BY KAREN BROOKS HARPER & ELEANOR KLIBANOFF, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE
11.30.2021
WHEN TEXAS IMPOSED the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, doctors and clinics were forced to move their patients quickly to out-of-state providers.
And for the past two months, providers have had to work in a sort of limbo as they wait to see if the new law passes the Supreme Court’s review.
“This is not patient care,” said CeCe Cheng, a maternal fetal medicine specialist in San Antonio. “This is disaster management. And it has no place in medicine.”
Continued: https://undark.org/2021/11/30/how-texas-abortion-law-is-impacting-patients-and-providers/
Senate Bill 8 has eroded abortion access in Texas. But desperate patients are still showing up to clinics seeking emotional support — and sometimes, out-of-state options.
Jennifer Gerson
September 20, 2021
Marva Sadler is not used to telling patients “no.” Since Senate Bill 8, Texas’ six-week abortion ban, took effect, she now feels like she’s saying it all day.
Sadler is the director of clinical services at Whole Woman’s Health in Fort Worth. When patients arrive at the clinic, she said, they are aware of the realities of the new law: Abortion past six weeks is now illegal, with no exceptions for rape and incest. Still, they can hardly process that there’s little the clinic can do to help them.
Continued: https://19thnews.org/2021/09/texas-abortion-clinics-are-now-trauma-centers/|
The Fight to Protect Abortion Access Amid the Pandemic
Jordan Smith
June 15 2020
It wasn’t much past 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning in late April, and anti-choice protesters outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, were already cantankerous: There were three men with bullhorns, including one on top of a ladder; a 1,200-watt speaker pointing toward the clinic’s front door; and another protester blowing a shofar. “Welcome to the circus,” said Kim Gibson, a clinic escort who works to keep the mayhem away from patients.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic has gripped the nation (new cases are still on the rise in Mississippi), protesters disregarded Jackson’s stay-at-home order and have consistently failed to wear masks or keep appropriate social distance — not only from one another, but also from patients, whose cars they readily approach in an effort to “counsel” them and hand out anti-abortion propaganda.
Continued: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/15/coronavirus-pandemic-abortion-acces
Texas banned me from providing abortions — using coronavirus as an excuse
The desperation we heard from patients was visceral. Some say they’ll go out of state for their procedures.
By Amna Dermish
April 4, 2020
As the coronavirus has destabilized the lives of millions, some government officials saw a political opportunity. In Texas, our governor and attorney general effectively banned almost all abortion procedures, citing the pandemic, and states including Oklahoma, Ohio and Alabama have taken similar actions. We indeed face an unprecedented public health crisis, one that makes my patients’ ability to access reproductive health care especially urgent. But my state officials have suddenly declared that abortion care is not medically necessary. Any doctor who the state claims violated that executive order faces a $1,000 fine or up to 180 days of jail time.
Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/04/texas-abortion-ban-coronavirus/
The Wall Some Texans Want to Build Against Abortion
Around the country, a “sanctuary city” movement is growing on the right and the left, as people seek to keep out views they don’t agree with, legal or not.
By Dionne Searcey
March 3, 2020
LINDALE, Texas — A small group of women at a recent City Council meeting held hands and offered hushed prayers in an otherwise silent room.
Everyone was waiting for the council members to decide whether their community would become the next “sanctuary city for the unborn.”
Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/politics/texas-abortion-sanctuary-cities.html
A new chain of Christian pregnancy centers will provide a controversial service: Contraception
By Sarah Pulliam Bailey
November 7, 2019
AUSTIN — When a low-income woman searches for reproductive care, she often goes to a Planned Parenthood clinic, where she’s treated as a patient with an array of medical options. Or she might go to a Christian pregnancy center, where she is counseled to carry a pregnancy to term.
But some Christians now see an opening for a third way to reach women — before they become pregnant — that also enables them to compete for federal money Planned Parenthood has decided to relinquish.
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