Emma, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy, lives in Texas now, which passed one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation in September. It bans abortions after 6 weeks (once a fetal heartbeat is detected). At that stage, most women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
Texas is among many states that have been tightening their abortion restrictions. And after the bombshell leak of a draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return control of abortion laws to the states, the future of abortion access is in even more peril.
“By the time I found out I was pregnant, I already had no choices within the state of Texas,” says Emma says.
"In case you think abortion laws don’t matter: last week a pharmacist declined to fill a prescription for a patient of mine with an ectopic pregnancy citing SB8 restrictions. The same medicine that saved my life in 2013 when I had my own ectopic pregnancy"
But that was in Indiana almost a decade ago. Now, she lives in Texas, and the climate surrounding abortion rights is much different, both in Texas and across the country.
That was true even before the bombshell leak of a draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return control of abortion laws to the states.
In September, Texas passed one of the most restrictive laws in the country that bans abortions after 6 weeks (once a fetal heartbeat is detected). At that stage, most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. Other states, including neighboring Oklahoma, are following suit with more restrictive laws of their own.
But there are other options that may even survive the fall of Roe. They’re limited, and some are of questionable legality, but advocates and others are working to make sure women know: They’re not alone.
Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst at the Stomacher Institute, a research group that supports reproductive rights, believes all signs are pointing toward the Supreme Court discarding precedent, upholding the 15-week ban in Mississippi, and gutting Roe, which says no state can ban abortion before a fetus can viably live outside the womb.
Stomacher estimates that 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. Twenty-two of those states already have taken steps to adopt early or total abortion bans. That means, Nash says, “that 36 million women of reproductive age would live in a state without abortion care.”
This would especially impact minority women and women living in rural communities, who are already disproportionately affected, Nash says, noting that 75% of abortions are among low-income populations that already lack access to health care in general.
Jessica Aron's, JD, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the U.S. is likely to be a place where abortion could be outright banned in half the country, where people will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will or find ways to self-manage their abortion.
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