USA – The Choice Some Pregnant Immigrants Face: Deportation or Parenthood

“People who are undocumented are scared to go anywhere, to do anything, to go to the doctor.”
Laura C. Morel, Mother Jones
July 3, 2025

Shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, and Texas completely outlawed abortion in communities along the Rio Grande Valley, the effect was swift. In this region, which is home to 1.4 million residents, most of them Latinx or immigrants, the area’s only abortion clinic in McAllen was forced to shut down.

“When we lost that, people lost care. That was the immediate first blow and it did send shock waves,” says Cathy Torres, organizing manager for the Frontera Fund, an abortion fund serving border communities in Texas from Brownsville to El Paso. The organization provides financial support toward abortions, flights, and hotels for people forced to leave the state for medical care. After the Dobbs decision, they also began funding other reproductive health services such as birth control and STI testing.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/the-choice-some-pregnant-immigrants-face-deportation-or-parenthood/


Deadly shootings in Minnesota have shaken abortion providers

The suspected shooter had a list of targets that included abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood affiliates and employees.

By Shefali Luthra, Grace Panetta
June 18, 2025

Abortion providers have long grappled with threats of political violence, but Saturday’s shootings targeting Minnesota lawmakers have put them on high alert, and many say they feel newly vulnerable.

Suspected shooter Vance Boelter had a list of targets that included other elected officials and abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood affiliates and employees, multiple outlets reported. Boelter had also previously spoken out against abortion, per multiple statements surfaced by news outlets.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/06/minnesota-shootings-abortion-clinics/


Planning for the Worst in Trump’s Next Term: Prepare, Don’t Panic, and Don’t Comply in Advance

Amy Hagstrom Miller championed abortion rights in Texas, and she’s ready for the next fight.

Mary Tuma
January 30, 2025

In the frenetic days following the November election, longtime abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller spent a lot of time in meetings—some in person, some on Zoom—rallying her troops. As one of the most prominent and tenacious independent abortion providers in the country, with six Whole Woman’s Health clinics in four states, it was a safe bet that she and her staff of 125 would find themselves in the crosshairs of a Donald Trump presidency and the anti-abortion extremists his second term will empower.

Hagstrom Miller could feel the alarm and dread that washed over some of her employees as they contemplated an America in which the 1873 Comstock Act might be enforced to institute a national abortion ban, the abortion pill would come under myriad other relentless attacks, federal appointees would use their bureaucratic powers to target providers in states where abortion remains legal, and patients would face new risks to their physical safety and constitutional rights.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/trump-amy-hagstrom-miller-championed-abortion-rights-in-texas-and-amy-hagstrom-miller-is-ready-for-the-next-fight/


Supreme Court decision allows pregnant people in Idaho to access emergency abortion care — for now

By Jen Christensen, CNN
Thu June 27, 2024

Pregnant people in Idaho should be able to access abortion in a medical emergency in Idaho, at least for now.

The Supreme Court formally dismissed an appeal over Idaho’s strict abortion ban on Thursday, blocking enforcement of the state’s law where it conflicts with federal law. With Thursday’s decision, the state would not be allowed to deny an emergency abortion to a pregnant person whose health is in danger, at least while the case makes its way through the courts.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/26/health/emtala-emergency-care-scotus/index.html


She wanted an abortion. Her only option was driving to Mexico.

An excerpt from 'Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in a Post-Roe America'

May 26, 2024
Shefali Luthra

This article, an excerpt from “Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in a Post-Roe America,” was originally published by The 19th.

Before Roe v. Wade fell, McAllen had been home to the last abortion clinic in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and Becky, a lifelong Texan and young college student, knew the place by sight. It was where the other girls at school used to go whenever they needed help, just by city hall, next to a church, and a short drive from an H-E-B supermarket. It was easy to find. There was a mural on the outside of brightly painted women standing in a field, holding what looked like balls of light, gazing up at the sun. The words hovered above them: “dignity.” “empowerment.”

Few places were harder hit by Roe’s fall than the Rio Grande Valley, which lies south of San Antonio and abuts the state’s border with Mexico. Even before 2021, reproductive health care in the region had been difficult to come by — and abortion, while technically available, was only barely so in practice.

Continued: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/052624_abortion_burdens/she-wanted-abortion-her-only-option-was-driving-mexico/


Disabled Texans face more barriers to accessing abortion

Few organizations track the number of disabled individuals trying to access abortion, but abortion providers and groups that help assist Texans obtain out-of-state abortions say they are falling through the cracks.

BY NEELAM BOHRA, Texas Tribune
FEB. 20, 2024

When disabled Texans used to visit abortion clinics, staffers would remember them. They may have needed in-clinic accommodations or American Sign Language Interpreters, and they appeared infrequently. Still, they came.

But more than a year since performing abortions became illegal in the state of Texas, disabled people have become a “missing population” at the clinics still providing abortions out of state, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider.

Continued: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/20/texas-abortion-disabled/


Virginia – ‘It’s cruel’: the last southern refuge for abortion rights might soon fall

Virginia is the only southern state that hasn’t restricted abortion post-Roe. Is that about to change?

Carter Sherman in Charlottesville, Virginia
Tue 31 Oct 2023

By the time Chasity Dunans learned about her pregnancy, she had already lost the right to end it.

She had gotten her period in July, but towards the end of the month the 23-year-old mother of one started to have heartburn and wrenching stomach pains. She told herself: you’re not pregnant, you’re just sick. When the pain didn’t stop, she gave in and saw a doctor.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/31/virginia-abortion-rights-ban-south-state


The rise of the abortion cowboy

By Becca Andrews
October 17, 2023

The doctor wants a pair of boots. Not just any boots, either. A specific brand of cowboy boot, handcrafted in Texas. Boots that adorn the feet of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, for instance, and singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton.

We’re at the airport in El Paso, after a seven-hour journey from a small regional airport in the Southeast to a major metropolitan airport to, finally, this airport, about an hour from the abortion clinic in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Dr. Aaron Campbell will work for a couple of days before flying back home. Campbell, who asked that his precise travel route not be published for safety reasons, has made this journey 10 times in the last year. But today, before he starts his rotation, he’s got plans. He wants proper cowboy boots and a cowboy hat to complete the look.

Continued: https://www.reckon.news/news/2023/10/the-rise-of-the-abortion-cowboy.html


Austin women’s clinic fights for its patients — and its future — in post-Roe world

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.

Continued: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/columns/2023/08/30/austin-womens-health-center-at-risk-closing-texas-abortion-ban-medical-care/70587287007/


‘It’s Breaking My Heart’: Abortion Providers on Life After Roe

For many abortion providers, working in a clinic isn’t just a job—it’s a calling. But clinics are businesses, too, and in the 15 states that have banned almost all abortions, business has been turbulent.

Carter Sherman, VICE
June 28, 2023

Kathaleen Pittman was too angry to retire.

Pittman had worked at Hope Medical Group, one of the last abortion clinics in Louisiana, for thirty years. She’d started there as a part-time counselor in 1992; by 2022, she was running the place. She’d gone to the Supreme Court to defend her clinic and won, successfully striking down a Louisiana abortion restriction in 2020.

Two years after that victory, she watched as the Supreme Court dismantled her life’s work by overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. She went back to court to try and fend off Louisiana’s cascade of abortion bans, but a month after the overturning, the clinic had to close. Louisiana had outlawed nearly all abortions.

Continued: https://www.rsn.org/001/its-breaking-my-heart-abortion-providers-on-life-after-roe.html