Not long after the Fifth Circuit’s decision was handed down, RH Reality Check detailed some of these women’s stories. Suzy, a mother of three, discovered that her appointment had been canceled after she had already pushed back the procedure multiple times to raise enough money for it. At the beginning of November, Suzy was already 19 weeks pregnant and running out of options — particularly since another piece of Texas’ omnibus new anti-abortion law bans abortions later than 20 weeks. Mary, a survivor of sexual assault, planned to have an abortion because she “cannot bear the thought of her rapist’s child,” but was forced to delay the procedure after her appointment was canceled. And Elena, a mother of three who scheduled her abortion for the beginning of November because she needed to put part of her October 31 paycheck toward the cost of the procedure, had to search for another clinic.
For those women, and the hundreds of others like them, rescheduling these appointments is much easier said than done. Elena, for instance, lives in the Rio Grande Valley — a rural border community where the closest abortion clinics are now 150 miles away. As soon as Texas passed its new abortion restrictions over the summer, it was pretty clear that the women living in the Rio Grande would be stranded far away from their right to choose, a new reality that media outlets have been freely acknowledging for months.
“For the border region of the Rio Grande Valley, this means women will have little choice but to turn to dangerous alternatives to deal with an unwanted pregnancy,” Texas Public Radio reported in July, noting that they’ll likely opt to buy abortion-inducing drugs at black market pharmacies in Mexico. “The only option left for many women will be to go get those pills at a flea market. Some of them will end up in the ER,” Lucy Felix, a community educator with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, told the New York Times. In August, the Texas Tribune reported an uptick in the number of women crossing the border for exactly this reason.
Amid the tattered remains of Roe v. Wade, these women are left behind. They’re living in the reality that Dellinger was referencing, the world in which affluent women may exercise their right to choose while impoverished women may not. It’s a world that Texas’ Republican officials were all too happy to embrace, and that they’re ready to keep fighting for in court. And it doesn’t look too different from 1972.
Andrew Breiner contributed graphic design to this article
Article Appeared @http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/12/04/2919111/supreme-court-roe-wade-exists/