Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Last Rural Abortion Clinics in Texas Just Shut Down
http://prospect.org/article/last-rural-abortion-clinics-texas-just-shut-downThe Last Rural Abortion Clinics in Texas Just Shut Down
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
March 6, 2014
Back-alley procedures are about to become a lot more common.
snip//
For many women, a long drive, an overnight stay, and a few days off work are a substantial burden, but not impossible. For the residents of the Rio Grande Valley, though, these new hurdles could make abortion as difficult to obtain as if it were illegal. McAllen is one of the poorest cities in the country, second only to Brownsville, another town nearby. Last fall, Sarah Posner documented some of the barriers that keep women in the Rio Grande from accessing basic reproductive healthcare like birth control. Unpaved roads, erratic electricity, and poor sanitation are common in the surrounding communities. Few of the Rio Grande’s residents have jobs with sick leave. By Hagstrom Miller’s estimate, around one-third of her patients are undocumented immigrants who can’t drive beyond the border checkpoints north of McAllen without risking deportation.
Rather than waiting for months to scrape together the money for the procedure and the trip—a Sisyphean task in itself, since the price for abortion skyrockets from as little as $300 in the first trimester to several thousand dollars by the end of the second—more women may take matters into their own hands. The Rio Grande Valley already has one of the highest rates of self-induced abortion in the country. A 2012 survey found that 12 percent of women in clinics near the Mexico border said they had attempted to end their pregnancy on their own before seeking professional help. “They’re getting drugs from Mexico, drinking teas, eating herbs, falling down the stairs on purpose or convincing their boyfriends to beat them up,” Hagstrom Miller says. “Any of those methods could be fatal.”
The problem is compounded by the Texas legislature’s decision, in 2011, to slash funding for family planning services. Dan Grossman, the vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health, a pro-choice think tank, has been investigating the effects of these cuts as co-principal investigator of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas-Austin. In a 2012 survey of women seeking abortions, nearly half of the respondents said they hadn’t been able to obtain their preferred form of birth control in the past three months. “The cuts in family planning are leading to a rise in unintended pregnancy and an increased demand for abortion,” Grossman says. “More clinic closures means that women will have to wait longer to get the procedure, which means a higher risk of complications.”
In 2013, 38 percent of people living in the Rio Grande Valley were uninsured. When state-funded family planning clinics in the region folded, poor women lost their only source of affordable birth control. Now, some may be getting access to contraception once again, thanks to the rollout of Obamacare. But Texas’s refusal to participate in Medicaid expansion means that many Rio Grande residents will fall into the “coverage gap”—earning too much to be covered under Medicaid but too little to qualify for insurance tax credits—and won’t be able to get the no-cost birth control promised by the Affordable Care Act. Others are undocumented and unable to buy insurance on the exchanges.
Long wait times for appointments will undoubtedly become the norm. By next fall, when the ASC requirement kicks in, six clinics in major urban centers—Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth—could be responsible for performing more than 70,000 abortions each year. Hagstrom Miller and others are fundraising to help poor women pay for transportation to these cities, but for many, a trip to Mexico to buy illegal abortion drugs might seem like a better bet.
28 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
pass laws against abortion. 
There always has been abortion, whether it's legal or illegal, going back thousands of years. There always will be abortion. We just need to make it available.
