A Texas law that took effect Wednesday prohibits all abortions for a person who is more than six weeks into their pregnancy — becoming the country’s first six-week abortion ban to be enforced, triggering what pro-choice advocates fear will be a domino effect on abortion access in the Midwest.
In a similar situation last year when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott used COVID-19 to ban abortion, providers in the St. Louis region began to see patients traveling from Texas for care, according to Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region.
The organization said it is already fielding calls from Texans who are scrambling to access abortion. Southern Illinois providers are preparing for an influx of patients, as well.
“We are ready to help patients from Texas access the care they need and deserve,” said Yamelsie Rodríguez, president and CEO of Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. “When politicians in other states have failed people in need of abortion, we have answered the call. RHS will do it again because abortion is health care and health care is a human right. However, despite our best efforts, the injustice here is that for far too many patients, traveling out of state will push access out of reach altogether. This is the reality we’ve long been warning about.”
Planned Parenthood and Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois, report having invested nearly $10 million in clinical capacity and infrastructure in preparation for more abortion bans and restrictions from neighboring states. The providers wrote that the number of women crossing state lines to have an abortion in Illinois has grown each year since 2014.
While Oklahoma and Arkansas sit between Texas and Missouri, those states just don’t have the resources or laws to serve Texan patients. St. Louis is more than 600 miles from Dallas, Texas, one of the most northern populous cities in the state.
In Oklahoma, unless the court intervenes, a whole list ofanti-abortion laws are slated to take effect Nov. 3 that will make abortion nearly inaccessible in Oklahoma with exceptions only for rare, life-threatening situations.
And Arkansas is currently trying to implement one of the country’s restrictive abortion laws, banning providers from performing abortions “except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency” with no exceptions for rape, incest or fetal anomalies. Abortion providers who violate the law could face fines of up to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison.
Currently, a person in Arkansas may elect to abort their pregnancy up through the first 20 weeks of their pregnancy. According to Guttmacher Institute, this timeline is based on the idea that a fetus can feel pain after that point in pregnancy — a notion inconsistent with scientific evidence and rejected by the medical community.
Most states surrounding Texas have received a surge of calls as the law went into effect, according to media outlets.
“A patient having to travel hundreds of miles across multiple state borders for health care is unacceptable. Hope Clinic knows this is already the reality for many patients,” said Erin King, MD, executive director and physician at Hope Clinic for Women. “We are prepared to provide abortion for patients that are unable to access this essential health care in their own community and state.”
Abortion providers in Texas asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and stop the law from taking effect, but the high court has yet to act.
Pro-Choice Missouri’s Executive Director Mallory Schwarz said in not acting, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned Roe v. Wade and stripped Texans of their fundamental right to access abortion.
“Their decision was not only an act of cowardice, but a calculated assault on every woman and person with capacity for pregnancy,” she said in a statement. “The courts are no longer our last refuge from the mounting attacks on reproductive freedom.”
Roe v. Wade was a landmark decision nearly 50 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution protects a pregnant person’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
