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BY SEAN MURPHY
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-lifestyle-business-louisiana-texas-0cc666fde471f0fe2ce8a5f28977ad28
SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) – The 33-year-old Texas woman drove four hours alone through the night to get a consultation at the abortion clinic in Louisiana. She originally planned to sleep in her car, but an advocacy group helped arrange a hotel room.
Single and with three children, ages 5-13, she feared that adding a baby would take away time, food, money, and space for her three children. She doesn’t have a job, and without the help of safe abortion groups, she probably would have looked for another way to end her pregnancy.
“If you can’t get rid of the baby, what are you going to do next? You will try to get rid of it yourself. So I think, ‘What could I do? What are some home remedies I could do to get rid of this baby, have a miscarriage, have an abortion? ‘ And that’s not how it should be. I shouldn’t have to do this. I shouldn’t have to think like that, feel like that, none of that.
“We need to be heard. That needs to change. That is not right.”
She was one of more than a dozen women who arrived on Saturday at Hope Medical Group for Women, a one-story brick building with covered windows south of downtown Shreveport. Some came alone. Others were accompanied by a friend or partner. Some brought their children with them because they could not get childcare.
All of them tried to end pregnancies, and most came from neighboring Texas, where the country’s most restrictive abortion law remains in place. It prohibits abortions once heart activity is detected, about six weeks before many women even know they are pregnant. It doesn’t make any exceptions for rape or incest. As a result, abortion clinics in surrounding states are inundated with Texan women.
The women agreed to speak to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity so that they could speak openly about their experiences.
Like many others, the 33-year-old Texan mother said she tried planning an abortion closer to home but was too advanced. When she came to the clinic for an abortion on Saturday, she was just nine weeks old and had to undergo a surgical abortion instead of taking medication. She said the ordeal made her angry at the Texan politicians who passed the law.
“If I had to keep this baby, I don’t know what would have happened. I would have probably gone mad and they don’t understand, ”she said with a moved voice.
A 25-year-old woman made the 70-mile journey south of Texarkana, on the Texas-Arkansas border. She said she was five weeks old before realizing she was pregnant and she knew it would be impossible to plan the required two visits to a Texan clinic. By the time she was able to make an appointment in Shreveport, her pregnancy was almost too advanced for an abortion with drugs.
“Fortunately, I found out because then I could still take the pill instead of the surgery,” she said.
While she was in the clinic, her husband waited for hours in the car with her young son, who is still a toddler and still breastfeeding. They had no one to watch him.
Texas law has wavered between courts for weeks. The Biden administration asked the courts again on Monday to suspend them. These efforts came three days after a federal appeals court reinstated the law after a bloody lower court ruling last week created a short 48-hour window during which Texas abortion providers rushed to readmit patients.
The anti-abortion campaign that fueled the law is aiming to reach the US Supreme Court, where anti-abortionists are hoping that the Conservative coalition formed under President Donald Trump will end the constitutional right to abortion that is pioneered by the landmark Judgment Roe v. Wade was established by 1973.
When most of the women entered the clinic’s parking lot, they were met by anti-abortion protesters, mostly from East Texas, who regularly travel to Shreveport.
John Powers, 44, a machinist from Jacksonville, Texas, said he usually takes the nearly two-hour drive twice a month with the goal of getting every woman to change her mind. In the 13 years he has protested outside of clinics, he says he convinced two women not to do what he calls “reversals” of abortions.
“I’m not going to say it happens often,” said Powers, who has six children and supports any law that makes it difficult for women to get an abortion. “Let’s say I’ll never have a turning point again, that one baby who can now grow up and get married and have their own children, go to school and maybe become a journalist. It would be worth it to me, it is easily worth it to me. “
As soon as they enter the clinic, the women are greeted by staff who offer security and understanding. The clinic director put her arm around a woman as she led her to the back of the clinic. A television in a corner of the waiting room is tuned to Black Entertainment Television. A separate “cold room” with soft music and large leather sofas offers the patient the opportunity to rest before the procedure.
Many of the women’s stories worry Kathaleen Pittman, the clinic director who started working at an abortion clinic 30 years ago. She said she recently spoke to a mother in Texas who is trying to obtain an abortion for her 13-year-old daughter who has been sexually abused.
“She’s a child,” said Pittman. “She shouldn’t have to travel for hours to get here. It’s absolutely heartbreaking. “
Before Texan law went into effect, Pittman said, about 20% of their customers were from Texas, mostly from the eastern part of the state near a three-state region called Ark-La-Tex, which has a population of about 1.5 million Shreveport in its geographical center. Now that number is closer to 60% and women are hundreds of miles from Austin, Houston or San Antonio.
According to the latest available data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports the right to abortion, about 55,440 abortions were performed in Texas in 2017, although some of these patients may have been foreign women. Abortions performed in Texas account for more than 6% of all abortions in the United States, Guttmacher reported.
With an estimated 1,000 women per week in Texas seeking abortions, clinics in surrounding states report being overwhelmed.
The Trust Women Clinic in Oklahoma City, which is about a three-hour drive from Dallas-Fort Worth, saw about 11 patients from Texas in August. In September, after Texas law went into effect, that number rose to 110 and the clinic’s phones kept ringing, said Rebecca Tong, co-managing director of Trust Women, which also runs a clinic in Wichita, Kansas.
“Many of them are literally trying to drive through the night and then show up for their appointment at 8 a.m. without having rested,” Tong said. “It’s just not a good situation to go to an outpatient practice after driving through the evening and think that you can just go home afterwards.”
Texas law and the difficulty of making appointments outside of the state also force women to wait longer, which means higher costs, more risks, and fewer options to terminate the pregnancy, Tong said.
Legislators in several states around Texas are hoping to pass a similar law that would prevent most abortions. In Oklahoma, Republican Senator Julie Daniels has authored or sponsored four separate measures to further restrict the practice. All four laws are being challenged in court.
When asked to answer the Texan women, Daniels said their calculation was not complicated.
“The calculation is simple and clear: an unborn child is a child. It is a life. It’s just like that, and therefore it doesn’t get any more complicated, ”she said. “My main concern is the life of the unborn child.”
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