Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?

As many conservatives hail the fall of Roe for saving unborn lives, high-risk pregnancy becomes even more perilous.

By Stephania Taladrid
January 8, 2024

Yeniifer Alvarez arrived in central Texas from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1998. At three, she was just old enough to have a sense of a world left behind: the fire that warmed the house in the evening, the meat hung to dry outside the door, and la bisabuela, her adored great-grandmother, who had died shortly before Yeni and her mom went north. In Luling, Yeni, her parents, aunts, and grandmother settled into a cramped house with a tin roof that was down the street from her great-uncles, the first members of the family to discover the town’s decent jobs, in the oil fields.

Black gold had been gushing there since the nineteen-twenties, and a sulfurous odor hung in the air. To this day, when the smell drifts fifty miles north, people in Austin call it “the Luling effect.” Yeni’s father worked in oil, too, but it wasn’t long before he was deported. Yeni’s mother, Leticia, stayed and got a job in the kitchen of a local Mexican restaurant, where the pay was modest but no one was asking about papers. Every morning, Yeni and her little brother Michael rode to a red brick schoolhouse in a car overstuffed with other kids. At the wheel was a neighbor who, for a dollar a day, took care of children whose parents’ workdays started well before class did. Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/abortion-high-risk-pregnancy-yeni-glick


Our Abortion Stories: Two Years of Texas’ S.B. 8

On this grim two-year anniversary, we lift up the stories of Texas women and their families who are fighting for the right to abortion care.
9/1/2023
by VAL DIEZ CANSECO and ROXY SZAL

Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade, representing the largest blow to women’s constitutional rights in history. In Texas, this has been part of women’s reality for years.

Two years ago, Texas’ S.B. 8 became law: the six-week ban with a “bounty hunter” provision. At the time S.B. 8 took effect, it was considered the most restrictive abortion ban to ever take effect in the U.S. post-Roe.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-stories-women-risk/


Texas – These abortion funds and practical support groups are bridging the gap for patients

Without these organizations, low-income and marginalized communities would not be able to access the abortion care they need.

By Rebekah Sager
June 15, 2023

Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, people sought out abortion funds and practical support groups as stopgap measures to receive abortion care. Today, these groups are essential, particularly for low-income and marginalized pregnant people, covering everything from travel expenses to child care and even the procedure itself.

The Brigid Alliance
Five years ago, the Brigid Alliance, a practical support organization that provides assistance to people who are forced to travel outside of their home states for abortion care, opened its doors when clinics in Texas began to close with the passage of S.B. 8.

Continued: https://americanindependent.com/abortion-funds-texas-practical-support-groups/


In the Post-Roe Era, Letting Pregnant Patients Get Sicker—by Design

Fearing legal repercussions, doctors in Texas say they are risking grave patient harm to comply with new abortion restrictions.

By Stephania Taladrid
May 6, 2023

Parkland Memorial Hospital is an elegantly landscaped, blue-glass facility gleaming in the concrete expanse of what was once a manufacturing district in Dallas. The sole public hospital in a city of nearly 1.3 million people, it’s also a beacon in the state. People in medical distress travel to see its doctors from rural towns hundreds of miles away, and some of those distressed patients are pregnant.

Half of the counties in Texas, according to state data, lack a single specialist in women’s health: no ob-gyn, no nurse, no midwife who can treat mothers and their babies. But Parkland, one of thirty-two hospitals credentialled to treat high-risk-pregnancy cases, takes all comers. More than ten thousand babies are born there every year, and pregnant people also show up in its hectic emergency room with conditions that threaten their lives. Some patients have hemorrhages and spiralling infections; some are critically ill with cancer or heart disease; some are at acute risk of stroke if they bring their pregnancies to term.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/in-the-post-roe-era-letting-pregnant-patients-get-sicker-by-design


The Real End Goal of the Anti-Choice Texas Abortion Lawsuit

BY MARY ZIEGLER, Slate
MARCH 28, 2023

Earlier this month, Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and the architect of S.B. 8, Texas’s six-week abortion ban, filed what seems like a long-shot lawsuit. Mitchell is representing a Texas man in a wrongful-death suit against two of his ex-wife’s friends and the person who provided them with an abortion pill.

This suit may never go anywhere, even in a state as hostile to abortion as Texas. State law requires that a death be “wrongful,” but the abortion in this case took place before Texas’ trigger ban took effect. Mitchell and his colleagues are relying on a pre-Roe criminal ban to try the case, and its legal status remains contested. As important, Texas law makes clear that pregnant people themselves can’t be sued or prosecuted for having abortions, so it’s not clear that aiding a woman in doing so would be considered wrongful either.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/personhood-laws-anti-choice-texas-abortion-lawsuit.html


How are new abortion laws affecting women in the United States?

Al Jazeera
Wednesday, October 12
25 minute video

It’s been more than 100 days since the United States Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion. In that time, life has changed dramatically for millions of Americans when it comes to their healthcare choices.

Giving states individual choice when it comes to providing abortions is spurring the creation of a chaotic patchwork system across the country. The procedure is banned or severely restricted in more than a dozen states, mainly in the south. Nearly 10 other states have bans in the works, but face legal challenges. This means almost one in three American women of reproductive age – disproportionally poorer women and those of colour – now live in a state with no abortion options, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Studies show that this lack of access puts pregnant women at risk for worse financial, health and family outcomes.

Continued: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2022/10/12/how-are-new-abortion-laws-affecting-women-in-the-united-states


When Can Dying Patients Get a Lifesaving Abortion? These Hospital Panels Will Now Decide.

Abortion bans force ethics committees to determine when a pregnancy is lethal enough to justify termination.

BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
JULY 29, 2022

When Elizabeth Weller’s water broke during the 18th week of her pregnancy, the prognosis was bleak: With almost no amniotic fluid left, the fetus could not survive. If Weller did not terminate immediately, she would be at risk of a potentially lethal uterine infection. She requested an abortion, but the hospital’s ethics committee refused. The committee feared that if doctors terminated Weller’s pregnancy before she was actively dying, they would face liability under Texas’ six-week abortion ban. So the committee forced her to wait until she had a high fever and “foul” discharge—symptoms of a serious infection in her uterus—to terminate.

Weller’s story, documented by Carrie Feibel in a wrenching NPR report, reflects a growing crisis in a post–Roe v. Wade America. Many states have banned or severely restricted abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe on June 24, enacting laws with extremely vague and narrow exceptions for the life of the mother. Health care providers have legitimate concerns that they will face civil and criminal liability if they terminate a pregnancy under any circumstances. They worry that judges, juries, and prosecutors will disagree that the patient had a true medical emergency. And so the decision shifts from the patient to the hospital, which frequently places these delicate considerations in the hands of ethics committees.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/07/abortion-ban-hospital-ethics-committee-mother-life-death.html


The inside story of how John Roberts failed to save abortion rights

Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Tue July 26, 2022

Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May's unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade made the effort all but impossible.

It appears unlikely that Roberts' best prospect -- Justice Brett Kavanaugh -- was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts' attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/supreme-court-john-roberts-abortion-dobbs/index.html


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/


Physicians Have Abortions Too: Maintaining Access to Abortion Supports Women’s Careers

Abortion is personal for physicians and healthcare workers, not just professional. We must help protect abortion access.

4/18/2022
by ARGHAVAN SALLES, MORGAN S. LEVY and VINEET ARORA

Being alive in 2022 means facing never-ending attacks on human rights. With the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s, there now seems to be little standing between those of us with a cervix and the autonomy over our own bodies.

When Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2020, many believed it would only be a matter of time before the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, securing the right to abortion, would be overturned. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2021, 19 states enacted 108 abortion restrictions, more than in any year since 1973. Prior to the end of 2021, the Supreme Court heard arguments related to two such bills: Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8) in Texas and Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health in Mississippi. The verdict on Dobbs is expected to be delivered this summer.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/04/18/abortion-doctors-physicians-career-roe-v-wade/