Abortion isn’t illegal in Texas. It’s just mostly impossible.

By Robert Rivard August 13
Robert Rivard is the editor and publisher of the nonprofit Rivard Report in San Antonio.

God help women who get pregnant in Texas and regret it. That’s especially true for women who live in the state’s vast geography west of Interstate 35, where abortion is no longer available, with the sole exception of a clinic in the distant border city of El Paso.

Women in Texas contend with state political leaders who treat legal abortion more like a sin and a crime. The Texas legislature convenes only once every two years, but that usually means things are going to get worse for women seeking reproductive services. Politics and religion, more than science or medicine, have driven most of the new restrictions on abortion here since 2011.

“We in Texas are in a bad place,” said Jeffrey Hons, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood South Texas in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. “For decades now, the right wing of Texas has known that it could not make abortion illegal, so they have worked to make obtaining an abortion impossible. They’ve been very successful.”

For the 90 percent of the 8 million adult women who live outside the state’s biggest metro areas — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso — seeking an abortion, or even an ideology-free family planning consultation, has become an almost insurmountable hurdle.

It’s even worse for the state’s population of undocumented women and legal residents who are brown-skinned and Spanish-language-dominant. The fear of detention and deportation is preventing many from seeking good health care, health-care professionals say. Women of Mexican and Central American origin are afraid to leave home, even to seek birth control.

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