Laredo, Texas.- Nine months have passed since Texas backtracked on reproductive rights of women by closing abortion clinics in the state and penalizing doctors, health workers and anyone who facilitates an abortion; however, That hasn’t stopped women from doing this procedure..
Women in Texas look for options elsewhere in the country or even abroad.
For example, Whole Woman’s Healthone of the nation’s largest independent abortion providers, opened a clinic in New Mexico, located in Albuquerque. Since then, nearly all of its patients have come from Texas, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the organization’s founder and chief executive officer.
“Texans need to know that they still have access to safe, legal abortions. They can count on receiving medical care in New Mexico,” she added.
Whole Woman’s closed its clinics in Fort Worth, McKinney, Austin and McAllen last June, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which effectively banned the procedure in Texas and about a dozen other states.
Like those clinics in Texas, many others had to close their services for fear of being fined or penalized. But that hasn’t stopped Texans from looking outside their state for alternatives.
For the above, organizations like Whole Woman’s got their start with social media advertising to advertise their services and options that Texans have to abort legally and safely.
Added to that, the vendor launched a GoFundMe page with the goal of raising $750,000 to fund the clinic’s operations in New Mexico, as well as travel costs for patients coming from out of state. So far it has raised nearly $450,000.
With some of the most progressive abortion laws in the country, New Mexico has reported an increased influx of patients from Texas and other states in recent months.
A March 2022 analysis by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found that 27 percent of Texans who traveled to other states for abortions went to New Mexico. Nearly half went to Oklahoma, which now also has its own restrictive abortion ban.
