BY ROXY SZAL | It’s been six long months since Texas’s six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 8, took effect. The devastating impact the law has had around the state, and the reverberations felt around the country, cannot be overstated.
- The average round trip to obtain an abortion outside of Texas has jumped from 807 to 1,160 miles since S.B. 8 took effect, according to Fund Texas Choice, the largest practical abortion support fund in Texas. Their call volume increased fivefold, and the vast majority (around 73 percent) of these callers are people of color.
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Clinics in surrounding states like Oklahoma and Louisiana are now overloaded with Texas patients. (A copycat abortion ban is working through the Oklahoma state legislature too, so this option may not be available for Texas abortion seekers in the future.)
- Daily, clinic administrators on the ground are forced to turn desperate people in tears away.
“The staff is exhausted. The phone calls are nonstop,” said Kathaleen Pittman, clinic administrator at Hope Medical Group for Women in Louisiana, who estimates more than 60 percent of patients at Hope Medical are from Texas. “The amount of control the state of Texas has over these women is horrific.”
Admittedly “every abortion ban creates a human rights tragedy,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates four clinics in Texas. But with S.B. 8, Texas achieved something no other state has: the banning of abortion at just six weeks gestation—making it the most extreme abortion ban to take effect in the U.S. since abortion was legalized in 1973.
Marc Hearron, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), calls the continuation of S.B. 8 “a grave warning for the rest of the country” and “a preview of what will happen on a much larger scale if Roe falls.”
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