“It Could End Abortion in America”: Two Tiny Towns At the Center of the Abortion Wars

New Mexico has emerged as one of the key battlefronts in the U.S. war over abortion.

By Carter Sherman
February 13, 2023

SANTA TERESA, New Mexico — When Paulina Caballero’s pregnancy made her so nauseous that she could no longer cook for her kids, she realized that she could not go through with it.

At 29, the Texas native was already a mother of three. She suffers, she said, from a medical condition that leads her to vomit uncontrollably during pregnancy and forces her to spend months in the hospital. During her first pregnancy, she lost 50 pounds. During her second, she lost 80. During her third, 40.

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bmxn/future-of-abortion-war-is-in-new-mexico

The New Mexico Provider Trying to Save Abortion for Texas Women

This 73-year-old physician is on a mission to make his clinic a refuge for women’s health care on the border

By Jada Yuan, Washington Post
May 10, 2022

Franz Theard plies his trade in the sunniest of shadow worlds. His innocuously named Women’s Reproductive Clinic of New Mexico is hidden in plain sight, down a slope in a strip mall, neighboring a Subway and a State Farm office, in a border town of a border town. It’s less than a mile from the Texas state line, amid the sprawl of El Paso, which is itself a crossing to Ciudad Juárez in old Mexico, as folks here call it, surrounded by fireworks stores and delicious tacos and the desert beyond.

Here, this 73-year-old Haitian American OB/GYN and abortion provider sits in windowless exam rooms, handing patients pills to end their pregnancies, skirting Texas law by a trick of New Mexico geography.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/05/10/new-mexico-border-provider/

What it’s like to take on the most vilified job in America

Andrew Richard

8/8/16
by Alice Hines

Sam Avery knew she could find what she needed at the All Families clinic, because she’d seen the protesters outside when driving through town. Their “Pray to End Abortion” signs billboarded an otherwise discreet service in Kalispell, Montana, population 22,000. It’s the kind of town where churches outnumber supermarkets and gay pride parades draw counter-protests. The clinic’s owner had a nickname: “Susan Cahill the baby killer,” says Avery. “She’s got that label for the rest of her life.”

Avery got pregnant after quitting the hormonal birth control that was making her sick. She decided to get an aspiration abortion, one of the most common surgeries in the U.S., which takes between three and 10 minutes to complete. Avery’s drive to All Families took four hours from her then-home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation through Glacier National Park and across the Continental Divide. When she finally met Cahill, she gleaned a different impression from others in town: “She’s a rare mix of badass and surly and also caring and understanding. She has the right proportions to be really good at what she did.”

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Source: Fusion

08.08.2016