It also featured a debate over government funding for Planned Parenthood. “The law’s practical effect is barring Black women in Texas from exercising their legal right to an abortion”.
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Two women in the study couldn’t get an abortion until the second trimester, when it is more complicated and expensive. They come with punitive regulations on clinics, impediments to those seeking abortions and nonsensical requirements on providers.
“If the High Court upholds the Texas laws women there will be forced to travel very long distances for abortion care or will lose access to this service altogether”, said Susan F. Wood, PhD, Executive Director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health at Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in a statement.
A 2013 Texas law headed for the Supreme Court is a prime example of the extremes to which the campaign has gone. The majority of the clinics left are located in the heavily populated urban areas of the state, while those in rural areas of the state are hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion provider.
Before the Routh Street clinic closed, Braun said that staff had seen women who had purchased pills from flea markets to self-induce abortions, and that the women would take upwards of a dozen pills without knowing how far along in pregnancy they were.
The Tennessee suit also challenges a 2012 law requiring physicians performing abortions to obtain admitting privileges at a local hospital. That same cycle saw the election of Elise Stefanik, the youngest woman ever sent to Congress and a committed pro-lifer. Low-income women, women of color and rural women bear the brunt of these harsh restrictions.
Advocates for women are hoping that personal stories will influence a March Supreme Court case about Texas restrictions that, if sustained, will make abortion access virtually inaccessible for most women in the state. But “undue burden” has been ill-defined.
Our views of women’s equality, participation in the labor force, and control over one’s own body have shifted dramatically in the past five decades. But a powerful new project from The Center for Reproductive Rights’ Draw the Line campaign is telling the far more complex, true story about the many reasons women may choose to end a pregnancy. This is despite the fact that an abortion is a medical procedure with no surgical component.
Introduced last summer, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance Act, or EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal health dollars, except in certain cases, from being used to fund abortions.
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“As we prepare to argue for women’s access to safe, legal abortion services before the U.S. Supreme Court, we need to make it clear to politicians exactly what’s at stake when they attack our reproductive freedom and fundamental rights”, she added. Though it’s been found to be unconstitutional, Rhode Island law still says a woman must tell her husband of plans for an abortion, even if doing so would put her life at risk. “It’s important when discussing abortion to focus on the actual people, not the policy”.
