In her well researched, and disturbing article, The Return Of The Back-Alley Abortion, Laura Bassett leaves no doubt about her answer to the question. While knowing many here have reservations about Huffington Post, I do not hesitate to recommend you read her well heart rending narrative containing many personal accounts of the ordeal poor women of Texas are going through due to closing half of its legal abortion clinics.
Now, however, Texas and other states are reversing course. State lawmakers enacted more abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2013 than they had in the previous decade, a trend that appears likely to continue in 2014. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that nearly 300 anti-abortion bills are currently pending in state legislatures.
The new restrictions have had a significant impact on women's access to abortion. A Huffington Post survey last year found that since 2010, at least 54 abortion providers across 27 states had either closed or stopped performing the procedure. Sixteen more shut their doors after Texas lawmakers passed some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country last summer. A federal appeals court upheld two of the new restrictions in a ruling last week.
Basset tells us the consequence of these reductions is that women are resorting to "many of the same dangerous methods they relied on in the pre-Roe era: seeking out illegal abortion providers, ... or attempting risky self-abortion procedures." And, sadly some woman are going to back alleys in Mexico. Yes, American women in 2014.
The situation is particularly dire in Texas. In 2011, the state had 44 abortion clinics, but more than half of them have since shuttered due to new anti-abortion laws. In September, when a state law requiring all abortions to take place in ambulatory surgical centers goes into effect, reproductive rights advocates expect 14 more clinics will have to close, leaving only six facilities to serve the nearly 75,000 women who seek abortions in Texas each year.
The poorest area of Texas, the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border, has no remaining abortion clinics. Women who live there have to drive roughly 240 miles to San Antonio for the nearest clinic, but many of them are Mexican immigrants with restrictions on their work visas that prevent them from traveling that far.
Basset also lets us now that conservatives have cut funding forcing 76 clinics offering birth control and reproductive services, to shut down.
How sad and shocking. I am somewhat stunned. Hating controversy, I've sort of have avoided this issues, figuring other progressives had adequately "covered he bases," and settled it in the 1970s, and had no expectations that I would ever write an article on it. Having no particular qualifications on this topic, my only reason for posting, is that no one else has seems to have posted on it, and adequate health care is such an important issue for all of us. Laura Bassett makes an important contribution worth your attention.