Hundreds of thousands of Texas women attempted self-induced abortion

Latina women living near the Mexican border and women who, due to cost or clinic proximity, had a hard time getting any reproductive health care at all, including Pap smears and contraception, reported abortion self-induction at significantly higher rates. For many women, the process of obtaining safe and legal health care has simply become unfeasible.

In Texas, rules require doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

In the first study of its kind, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), run by the University of Texas, attempted to show the prevalence of self-induced abortions in the state in the wake of legislators’ attempts to limit women’s access to abortions.

It found that wait time to schedule an abortion was now about three weeks, putting abortions out of reach for a few women, while clinic closures have put constraints on women who may not have resources to travel hundreds of miles to a clinic. The court on Friday agreed to hear a challenge by abortion providers to parts of a restrictive, Republican-backed Texas law they contend are aimed at shutting abortion clinics.

The justices likely won’t hear arguments until the spring, with a decision no sooner than summer. Texas abortion providers are now challenging the Supreme Court to declare how far states can go in restricting abortion to protect women’s health, never fully clarified in court.

“The state has wide discretion to pass laws ensuring women are not subject to substandard conditions at abortion facilities”.

“People in the media refer to this bill as the defund Planned Parenthood bill, but there is no mention of any particular abortion provider in this legislation”, Conduit said. So they don’t have any specific data on whether self-inducement rates have increased since HB2 – but now they have a baseline measurement to refer to later, which may come in especially handy if abortion access gets even more restricted in Texas.

But pro-abortion advocates counter that these “will jeopardise women’s health by drastically reducing access to safe and legal abortion services throughout the state”, arguing that outside Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio, women would not have an abortion facility under the 2013 law. The lack of abortion clinics in Texas has already forced women to drive to New Mexico to have their procedures done there. Then, the focus on abortion rights and restrictions helped Bill Clinton against President George H.W. Bush, polls and studies suggest. The big question before the Supreme Court is whether distances like these pose an “undue burden” for women seeking an abortion.

The Supreme Court ruling will also pave the way for a number of similar regulations in other states to find resolution.

The Supreme Court has not issued an opinion on abortion since 2007, when it upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortion. The justices would do well to uphold the reasonable law in Texas and reconsider the long, deadly shadow its abortion decisions have cast over law, medicine, and society.

“This is a risky, unsafe procedure and it’s standard medical care to have hospital-admitting privileges”, said Cheryl Ciamarra of Alabama Citizens for Life.